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. It shares the square with a horse chestnut the register also lists, the two trees framing the same small public space from different corners. 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.