London Plane

The London plane is a tree that a city adopted and then named after itself. It is a hybrid, a cross between the American sycamore and the Oriental plane that appeared in Europe in the 1600s and turned out to be almost indestructible in a dirty city: it shrugs off soot, tolerates brutal pruning, and sheds its bark in patches to slough off pollution. That made it the default street tree of industrial London, and from there of Paris, Amsterdam and half the capitals of Europe. The oldest specimens are now three centuries old and enormous, and because the tree was planted everywhere, the remarkable ones hide in plain sight: a churchyard in the City of London, a Mayfair square, a riverside suburb. These are the London planes mapped on the site so far, oldest first.