The Oldest Plane of Bahçeköy 1,300-1,400 years
Bahçeköy, Sarıyer. Istanbul's oldest living thing predates the city's Ottoman name by seven centuries.
Oriental Plane
Before the London plane existed, its eastern parent was already the most storied shade tree in the world. This page maps every oriental plane on the site, 29 so far across 14 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.
Paris
The Buffon Plane 240 years
Jardin des Plantes, 5th arrondissement. 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 Great Plane of Parc Monceau 210 years
8th arrondissement. The thickest tree in Paris has a waistline of seven metres.
Rome
Adonis 425 years
Villa Borghese, Pinciano. Nine trees are what remain of the eleven Cardinal Scipione Borghese planted here four centuries ago.
The Twin Planes of the Eleven Fountains 350 years
Trastevere, at the foot of the Gianicolo. Two oriental planes here are older than the university that now owns them.
Istanbul
The Ahtapot Çınar up to 580 years
Bahçeköy, Sarıyer. Seven trunks that are actually one tree share a single root system at this bend in the Bahçeköy forest.
The Plane Trees of Beykoz Çayırı 400-500 years (average, multiple trees)
Beykoz. 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.
The Taşlı Çınar 446 years
Alemdar, Fatih. A stone was lodged inside this tree's bark for roughly three centuries, and until about ten years ago you could still see it.
The Hüseyin Avni Dede Plane 375 years
Beyazıt, Fatih. A tree in Istanbul has had the same downstairs neighbour for 58 years.
The Çengelköy Plane roughly 180 years
Çengelköy, Üsküdar. This tree spent a night on the ground and got back up.
Dublin
The Champion Planes of New Square 190 years
Trinity College, Dublin 2. 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.
Brussels
The Oriental Plane of Parc Leopold 200 years
European Quarter. The thickest tree of its kind anywhere in Brussels stands in a park built over a vanished stream.
Vienna
The Cemetery Plane of Singerstraße 290 years
Innere Stadt, 1st district. This tree has been quietly absorbing a piece of iron fence for two and a half centuries.
The Mozart-Platane 245 years
Landstraße, 3rd district. A memorial stone at its base calls this tree the Jacquin-Platane, but almost nobody in Vienna uses that name.
The Sisi-Platane of Volksgarten 200+ years
Innere Stadt, 1st district. Vienna named this plane tree after an empress who famously disliked Vienna.
Athens
The Trees of Kaisariani Monastery decades to roughly 200 years, undated individually
Kaisariani, Mount Hymettus. A monastery on Mount Hymettus has drawn people to the same spring for over two thousand years, long before the Byzantine monks who gave Kaisariani its name and its 11th or 12th century church ever arrived.
The Plane Trees of Zappeion 60-165 years, mixed generations
Syntagma. 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 Plane Trees of Kefalari, Kifisia century-old, roughly 100-130 years
Kefalari, Kifisia. 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.
Naples
The Plane Tree of the Villa Comunale 19th century, undated precisely
Chiaia. 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 near the garden's street boundary, is among the most substantial: 18 metres tall with a trunk 428cm across.
The Platano of San Severino regrown from a felled root since 1959
San Lorenzo. 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.
Bologna
The Oriental Plane of Piazza Malpighi approximately 200 years
Malpighi. 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 ground used from 1612 for horsemanship and public events, before the noble Rusconi family converted it into a private garden around 1825 and planted, among other trees, this Oriental plane.
Oxford
The Pococke Plane 270 years
City centre. 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 Laudian Professor of Arabic.
Cambridge
The Oriental Plane of Jesus College 224 years
City centre. 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 eventually filled six published volumes and made him one of the era's best-known explorer-scholars.
Dubrovnik
The Plane Trees of Trsteno around 500 years
Trsteno. 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's main square.
Arnhem
The Huissensedijk Plane ~265 years
Elden. 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.
Thessaloniki
The Kastro Plane ~828 years
Kastra, Ano Poli. At the corner of two narrow streets below Thessaloniki's Byzantine walls stands a tree old enough to have watched the Ottomans arrive.
The Navarino Square Plane ~310 years
City centre. 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 beside the square where the tree now stands.
The White Tower Plane ~235 years
Waterfront. 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 years old, yet it is the largest of the four by a clear margin: 26.4 metres tall with a trunk 140 centimetres through at chest height, taller and thicker than the 828-year-old tree in the old town above it.
The Apostolou Pavlou Plane ~205 years
Ano Poli. 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 Atatürk Museum, the birthplace, by tradition, of the Turkish republic's founder, and now free to enter for anyone who visits.
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