The thickest tree of its kind anywhere in Brussels stands in a park built over a vanished stream.
Photo: Ben2~commonswiki (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Oriental Plane
Platanus orientalis
Before the London plane existed, its eastern parent was already the most storied shade tree in the world. We map 62 of them, in 32 cities.
Hippocrates is said to have taught medicine under an Oriental plane on Kos, Herodotus tells of a Persian king who halted an entire army to decorate one, and across Greece, Turkey and the Balkans the village square and the plane above it grew up as a single institution. The species hollows as it ages without weakening much, which lets individual trees pass five hundred years while whole communities hold meetings, weddings and cafes inside and beneath them. The Oriental planes mapped so far include spring-side giants that predate the towns around them, oldest first.
Brussels
Seventy metres separate this tree from its own hybrid offspring.
Parc Leopold holds the thickest oriental plane in the Brussels-Capital Region.
Cambridge
Edward Daniel Clarke, a Jesus College fellow and later Cambridge's first professor of mineralogy, spent the years around 1800 travelling through Greece, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, a journey that...
Bologna
This plane tree grows in a garden raised more than four metres above the surrounding piazza, a quirk of geography with a specific origin: the ground was once known as the Cavallerizza, a riding gro...
Photo: Aneta Malinowska (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Paris
In 1785, four years before the Revolution, the naturalist Buffon planted three oriental planes in the garden he had run for half a century.
The thickest tree in Paris has a waistline of six and a half metres.
Millions of people climb past this tree every year on their way to something else.
Two oriental planes stand a few metres apart here, one measuring 470 centimetres around the trunk and the other 415.
Vienna
This tree has been quietly absorbing a piece of iron fence for two and a half centuries.
Photo: GuentherZ (CC BY 3.0)
Two Oriental planes stand in front of the Hietzing parish church, and the district tells their story as a thank-offering for surviving the plague.
A memorial stone at its base calls this tree the Jacquin-Platane, but almost nobody in Vienna uses that name.
Photo: GuentherZ (CC BY 3.0)
Vienna named this plane tree after an empress who famously disliked Vienna.
Photo: Michael Kranewitter (CC BY-SA 3.0 AT)
There used to be two of them.
The city's own description calls this one of the mightiest planes in Vienna, and the numbers back it: 5.1 metres round the trunk, about 26 metres tall, a crown a good 25 metres across.
Dublin
Two plane trees in New Square have outgrown almost everything else on Trinity's campus, and both went in around 1834, when the college was rebuilding this quadrangle.
Photo: Yair Haklai (CC BY-SA 4.0)
London
The tree that helped make London a city of planes is not a London Plane.
Photo: Hopefully Acceptable Username (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Amsterdam
In a bad summer this plane stays green while its cousins go brown.
Barcelona
Every plane tree on the streets around this one is a hybrid.
Leeuwarden
Step off the train at Leeuwarden and the first old tree you meet is the wrong plane.
The plane tree in front of Leeuwarden's former stock exchange spent years hemmed in by brick paving before the city dug it back out in 2005 and built a proper rooting structure around the trunk.
Rome
Nine trees are what remain of the eleven Cardinal Scipione Borghese planted here four centuries ago.
Photo: Patafisik (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Two oriental planes here are older than the university that now owns them.
Geneva
Geneva has plane trees along half its streets and almost none of the tree they came from.
Naples
Naples's seafront garden holds five of the twenty-six trees the Campania region has catalogued as monumental across the whole city, and this Oriental plane, standing beside the Fontana dei Leoni ne...
Photo: Sordelli (CC BY-SA 3.0)
The tree standing today in the Cloister of the Platano is not the tree the cloister was named for, though it is, in a sense, the same organism.
Photo: Giuseppe Guida (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Copenhagen
This is an eastern Mediterranean tree standing 5.80 metres round in a Copenhagen brewery garden.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Utrecht
Four Oriental planes stand together on one spot in Hieronymusplantsoen, registered nationally as a single monumental entry because whoever surveyed them treated the group, not any one trunk, as the...
The largest thing in this old convent garden is younger than the garden by more than four centuries.
The leaf gives it away before anything else does.
Photo: Gijs Romijn (CC BY)
Janskerkhof looks like a churchyard and mostly still is one, a square in central Utrecht built around the Gothic Jans Church, with a weekly flower market and, in its northeast corner near the old c...
Lepelenburg was a defensive bastion on Utrecht's medieval city wall before it became a park around 1860, part of the same conversion that turned the whole ring of fortifications into the Singelplan...
Padua
Lightning opened this plane from the base upward and it kept going.
Photo: lejones417 (CC BY-SA)
Athens
Almost two hundred plane trees went into the ground around the Zappeion in 1857, two decades before the neoclassical hall they now surround had even been designed.
The taverna took its name from the tree, not the other way round.
Kifisia was ancient Athens' summer retreat long before it became modern Athens' wealthiest suburb, and the plane trees shading Kefalari Square are the clearest living link between the two.
Istanbul
Istanbul's oldest living thing predates the city's Ottoman name by seven centuries.
Istanbul's most famous plane tree has been dead for about a century.
Seven trunks that are actually one tree share a single root system at this bend in the Bahçeköy forest.
Ottoman sultans hunted on this exact meadow, which is why locals still sometimes call it Hünkar Çayırı, the Sultan's Meadow, instead of its official name.
Photo: Nanahuatl (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A stone was lodged inside this tree's bark for roughly three centuries, and until about ten years ago you could still see it.
Photo: Luke Padon (CC BY 4.0)
A tree in Istanbul has had the same downstairs neighbour for 58 years.
Photo: Janabaevazizbek (CC BY-SA 4.0)
This tree spent a night on the ground and got back up.
Thessaloniki
At the corner of two narrow streets below Thessaloniki's Byzantine walls stands a tree old enough to have watched the Ottomans arrive.
This plane tree has spent three centuries next to one of the more improbable ruins in central Thessaloniki: the palace the Roman emperor Galerius built for himself around 300 AD, excavated directly...
Standing across the square from the White Tower, Thessaloniki's best-known monument, this plane tree is younger than its two counterparts in Kastra and Navarino Square, core-sampled at around 235 y...
The youngest of Thessaloniki's four core-sampled ancient planes, at around 205 years old, grows at the entrance to a house built in the final years of the Ottoman era and preserved today as the Ata...
Oxford
Edward Pococke spent years in Aleppo and Constantinople as an Oxford scholar sent to master Arabic manuscripts, and returned in 1636 to become the university's first Regius Professor of Hebrew and...
Dubrovnik
Around 500 years ago, a sea captain remembered as Florio Jakob Antunov sailed home to Trsteno from Constantinople with five young plane tree saplings and planted them beside a spring on the village...
Arnhem
The thickest Oriental plane in the Netherlands stands beside the smallest, whitest church in Arnhem, and the two have shared roughly two centuries of the same ground.
Arnhem already has one Oriental plane with a claim to national fame, a giant beside a village church in Elden with a trunk over seven metres round.
Curinga
The hollow inside this plane tree once took a hundred sheep.
Photo: Antonio Bretti (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Crete
The trunk measures roughly 24 metres around, which is among the largest recorded for a plane tree in Europe.
Every other oriental plane on Crete is bare in January.
Cyprus
Cyprus put this tree on a postage stamp.
Garmen
Two plane trees stand opposite the church of St.
Graz
Graz protects eighteen plane trees as natural monuments, and the register records only one of them as an Oriental plane.
Hilversum
Left to itself in open ground an oriental plane spreads sideways rather than upward, and this one has had a meadow to do it in for about a century and a half.
Le Guerno
The branches of this plane sag until they touch the ground, root where they land and grow back upward, so the tree has built itself a set of arches to stand in.
Les Clayes-sous-Bois
This plane tree is 31 metres tall and 43 metres wide, which is the wrong way round for a plane and takes some explaining.
Photo: Polymagou (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Roosendaal
This Oriental plane stands by De Kring, a public square in Roosendaal, banded by the national register to a planting around 1850, roughly 180 years old.
Tata
In 2015 the great plane of Tata finished second in Europe, about 6,300 votes short of the winner.
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