The Westersingel Plane

Moving a mature tree across a street sounds like a euphemism for felling it and planting a new one, but Rotterdam actually did it: sometime in the 1960s, engineers transplanted this plane tree bodily from the west side of the Westersingel canal to the east side, roots and all, rather than lose it to whatever roadworks or redesign prompted the move. It survived the operation and kept growing, now roughly 130 years old and widely considered one of Rotterdam's most impressive individual trees, a status confirmed in 2021 when it placed second in the Netherlands' national Tree of the Year competition, a public vote that draws entries from across the country. The achievement is not really about beauty or age alone. Rotterdam has fewer monumental trees than almost any comparable Dutch city, a direct consequence of the 1940 bombing that flattened its historic centre and the soft, subsiding soil across much of the region that shortens most trees' working lives regardless of what happens above ground. A plane tree that not only reached this size but survived being dug up and relocated says something about the species' famous toughness along waterways, and about a city that has had unusually good reason to fight for the few old trees it has left.