The Plane of Westersingel

This London plane stands at a junction most people pass through rather than stop at, where the Westersingel canal crosses the Mauritsweg and Witte de Withstraat, planted sometime around 1900 to 1910 as the streets around it took their current shape. It is younger than the two more storied planes elsewhere on the same Westersingel, the one that survived the 1940 bombing and the one a South African poet once read verse beneath, and it carries no comparable story of its own beyond simply having grown steadily at a crossing for over a century. That plainness is not nothing. Most street trees this old in a heavily bombed, heavily rebuilt city do not make it, and this one has, standing through whatever traffic patterns and canal-side redevelopment the junction has seen since the Edwardian era. It grows in the open, free, on the same short stretch of canal that carries two of Rotterdam's more famous trees, worth a stop on the same walk rather than a destination by itself.