The Plane of the Giardini Cavour

This garden is built on the rubble of Turin's defences, and the humps you walk over are the evidence. When the seventeenth century fortifications came down the ground was left uneven, and between 1872 and 1875 Ernesto Balbo Bertone di Sambuy turned that awkward topography into an English style garden of irregular mounds and curved beds, planting large trees straight into it: planes, limes, oaks, horse chestnuts, magnolias. This plane is the one that did best. It stands thirty-four metres tall with a crown thirty metres across, so it covers most of the garden on its own, and it is five and a half metres round the trunk. Platanus x acerifolia is a hybrid of the oriental and the American plane that turned up in seventeenth century Europe by accident and then became the standard city tree everywhere, because it puts up with compacted soil, drought and filthy air, and sheds its bark in plates to shed the dirt along with it. Turin took to it harder than most Italian cities: half the trees on the regional monumental register for the comune are planes. Look for the flaking camouflage bark and the fruit balls that hang on stalks all winter.