The Oriental Plane of Van Asch van Wijckskade

The leaf gives it away before anything else does. Where a London plane's leaf has broad, shallow lobes, an Oriental plane's is cut almost to the base into narrow fingers, and the tree on Van Asch van Wijckskade is the real thing, not the more common hybrid that fills most European streets. Its trunk has grown to five and a half metres around, thick enough that the Dutch monumental tree register simply calls it a large presence on a street that does not have many. The register's own notes place it beside a school building, which under normal circumstances would be reason to leave a tree off this list. This one clears that bar anyway: the plane itself grows on the public kade, the paved towpath along the canal, not inside the schoolyard, and it is visible and reachable from the street at any hour without setting foot on the school's own ground. Planted sometime between 1870 and 1900, which puts it at roughly a century and a half old without pinning down a firmer date, it grows at the quiet northern edge of Utrecht's historic centre, near Begijnekade, a fifteen minute walk from the bastion parkland where three of its neighbours on this list also stand.