The Lijnbaan Plane

This plane was likely planted in 1851 in the garden of the Coolsingel hospital, and it was still there in May 1940 when German bombing destroyed most of Rotterdam's city centre in a single night, the hospital included. Only the tree and the building's entrance gate came through. The gate stands beside the plane today, the two of them forming what Rotterdammers now treat as an accidental monument neither was designed to be. The tree nearly lost a different fight two decades later. When the Lijnbaan, one of Europe's first purpose-built pedestrian shopping streets, was extended and renovated in the 1960s, the plan called for a dead straight line the tree and gate stood directly in the way of. Shopkeepers fought the compromise that saved them and lost; the street bent anyway, a small square was built around the tree instead, and the shops went up around that. A Rotterdam poet, Pascale Duin, later wrote it an ode calling it a silent witness. In 2019 it was nominated to represent the whole province of Zuid-Holland in the national Tree of the Year contest. It stands free, in the open, one of two Rotterdam planes known to have survived the exact night that erased almost everything around them.