The Oriental Plane of Lepelenburg

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 Singelplantsoen. This Oriental plane, the species that gives the London plane half its parentage, stands beside the Herenbrug bridge inside that park, dated by the Dutch national monumental tree register to the early 1900s, a later addition to the grounds rather than one of the original 1860s plantings. Platanus orientalis is native to the eastern Mediterranean and southwest Asia, grown across Europe for centuries before its American-crossed hybrid became the more common street tree; a pure Oriental plane like this one is rarer to find in a Dutch park than its more widespread offspring. No girth has been recorded for it, and no source found names or dates this individual tree directly, so the record here rests on the register alone, corroborated only by Lepelenburg's own well documented general history rather than anything specific to this trunk. It stands a few minutes' walk from Servaasbolwerk and Zonnenburg, within reach of the other bastion-park trees mapped on this site, on ground that has gone from a soldier's lookout to a footbridge crossing in under two centuries. Free, public parkland near the old city centre.