The Great Plane of the Giardino Pubblico

The city dug up the pavement around this tree and threw it away. The Giardino Pubblico's biggest plane is 542 centimetres round the trunk and thirty-four metres tall, the largest tree in Trieste by measurement, and the paving laid over its root plate was slowly suffocating it, so the municipality broke the surface out and replaced it with draining material. That is what caring for a 180 year old tree in a city actually looks like. The garden around it was begun in 1854 by Muzio de Tommasini, a serious botanist who happened also to be the podesta of Trieste, on ground bought from Benedictine nuns after a plan to build a church and housing there was dropped. He planted the planes himself. Three hectares now hold roughly 320 large trees from five continents, arranged along paths lined with the bronze heads of Triestine writers, and Italo Svevo walked here often enough that the garden turns up in what he wrote. Nine planes in this garden are on Italy's monumental register and this is the heaviest of them. Stand back far enough to take in the whole trunk: the bark flakes off in plates and leaves the pale patchwork that is the only thing about a London plane you can identify from a hundred metres.