The Oriental Plane of De Kring

This Oriental plane stands by De Kring, a public square in Roosendaal, banded by the national register to a planting around 1850, roughly 180 years old. A horse chestnut of about the same age once shared the square with it; the register records that tree felled in 2014 and a young one planted in its place, which leaves the plane as the oldest trunk on De Kring. A London plane from around 1900 to 1910 stands about 13 metres east, in front of it. Oriental plane is the older, wilder-growing parent of the hybrid London plane that lines so many European streets, native to southeast Europe and western Asia, and it is planted less often in the Netherlands than its more tolerant offspring. Left to grow on an open square rather than pruned to a street profile, an Oriental plane develops the same flaking, camouflage-patterned bark as its hybrid relative but with a more irregular, spreading crown, often leaning and forking low rather than rising in a single clean trunk. The register records the species and the decade but nothing of who planted it or why, which is typical for a tree whose interest is simply having survived on the same square for nearly two centuries while whatever stood around it changed. If you know more of De Kring's own history, tell us.