This plane tree was young when the Margit Bridge beside it was blown up in the Second World War, and it kept growing.
Photo: Róbert Kőszegi, Gábor Holczer (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Plane
Platanus sp.
These planes carry only their genus, Platanus, because whichever register or record named them stopped there or the sources disagree: planes hybridise readily and the parents can be hard to call from bark and leaf alone. We map 7 of them, in 7 cities.
The Platane de Préty went into a mound beside the village church in 1801, in place of an elm under which justice had been dispensed, to mark priests returning after the Revolution; never pollarded, it is 34 metres tall, and France protected it in 1909. In Pisa, two sources looked at the plane of the Scuola Botanica and named two different species. The Hague's Plane of Park Hoekenburg grows over Forum Hadriani, a Roman port town. Bratislava's is 6.11 metres round, and Budapest's at Jászai Mari Square kept growing after the bridge beside it was blown up in the war. If you can tell an Oriental from a London plane, tell us.
Budapest
The Hague
One of the finds pulled out of the ground in this corner of Voorburg was a wooden post cut from an oak felled in the year 212, a date read off its rings.
Bad Homburg
At 5.66 metres round, this is the thickest trunk anyone has measured in the park, wider than the famous cedars and wider than the big oak thirty metres away.
Bratislava
Six metres and eleven centimetres round the trunk, standing in a wood where nobody planted it for show.
Hoorn
The register gives this one a planting year rather than a band: 1871, at the waterside of the Oosterpoortsgracht in the Oosterplantsoen.
Pisa
Two sources have looked at this tree and come back with two different species.
Préty
This plane has been under state protection since 1909 and, by the accounts that survive, under nobody's saw since it was planted.
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