The Park Plane

This plane tree was already standing when father-and-son landscape architects Jan David and Louis Paul Zocher began designing het Park around it in 1852, which means the tree came first and the celebrated English-style landscape grew up around a specimen nobody planted specifically for the design. It has since survived two disasters that reshaped Rotterdam far more than any garden ever could. The German bombing of May 1940 destroyed most of the city's historic centre a short walk away; the tree stood close enough to feel it and far enough to survive. Thirteen years later the North Sea flood of 1953 put het Park itself underwater for an extended stretch, one of the worst natural disasters in modern Dutch history, and the tree came through that too, roots submerged in salt water that killed less established trees outright. Today its trunk measures 185 centimetres across, thick enough that the city's own tree inspectors check it on a regular safety schedule reserved for its most significant specimens. Het Park itself is a national monument, 21 hectares running along the Maas river beside the Euromast, and this plane is the one tree in it old enough to have watched the whole modern city rebuild itself twice.