The Breitenbach Plane

This plane tree has been standing since 1860, older than the Westersingel canal that now runs beside it, and it survived the one event that erased almost everything else nearby: the German bombing of Rotterdam's city centre on 14 May 1940, which burned through this exact stretch of the city and somehow left the tree unscathed. Decades of care since have earned it an unofficial title, the most expensive tree in Rotterdam, for the sustained municipal maintenance a tree this old and this large now requires. It nearly lost a different fight in the 1960s, when a major redesign of the Westersingel waterway put the tree directly in the way of new plans; the city's own head of landscaping at the time, Andre Raad, pushed back hard enough that engineers rerouted the water instead of felling the tree, an unusual case of a canal moving to accommodate a plant rather than the other way round. Its more recent name comes from South African poet Breyten Breytenbach, who recited poetry beneath it in the 1970s and declared it the grave of the unknown poet, a line that stuck well enough that Rotterdam's own Poetry International later gave the spot a permanent place in the city's poetry trail. It still stands at the corner of Mauritsweg and Westersingel, doing the same job it has done since before the Netherlands had a railway.