The Plane of Nove Mlyny

The London plane is an accident. It did not exist before the seventeenth century, when an oriental plane and an American one crossed somewhere in a European garden and produced a tree that turned out to be almost impossible to kill in a city. That accident is why planes line so many European streets, and why one of them stands on the corner of Nové Mlýny and Klimentská, opposite the church of St Clement, in the quiet Petrská quarter a couple of streets back from the Vltava. Prague's register of protected trees measured its trunk at 342 centimetres in 2017, and it has been adding to that figure ever since, because planes grow quickly. The register's note claims nothing grander than what it is: a locally dominant tree, above the average of its kind in size and age, protected on that basis. No planting date has been published, and that single entry is the whole of the evidence. Plane bark is why the species won the nineteenth century. It sheds in plates instead of thickening, carrying off a year of soot and grime with it, which kept planes alive in industrial cities that killed nearly everything else. The shedding leaves the familiar camouflage of cream, olive and grey, and it shows best in winter, when there is nothing on the branches to distract from it.