The Plane of the Macarena Wall

The longest surviving stretch of Seville's twelfth century wall has a plane tree growing against it. Twenty seven metres tall, 4.20 metres round at chest height and 5.90 at the base, with a crown eighteen and a half metres across, on Calle Muñoz León where the Almohad wall runs from the Puerta de la Macarena towards the basilica. The London plane is a hybrid nobody set out to make. An oriental plane and an American plane crossed in a European garden in the seventeenth century and produced something tougher than either parent, which then went on to line half the avenues in Europe: it puts up with compacted soil, drought and dirty air, and sheds its bark in plates that carry the grime off with them. The Spanish name is plátano de sombra, the shade plane, which is an honest description of the job. There is an administrative curiosity in the record. The city's 2022 survey lists the ground as municipal but marks it sin recepcionar, not yet formally taken over, so a monumental plane is growing in the gap between two departments. Its physiology, structure and plant health were all recorded as normal or clean at the time. The wall behind it went up when Seville was the capital of an empire that reached Marrakesh.