The Thickest Plane of the Zocherpark

Zocherpark is not one park but a chain of them: Zonnenburg, Servaasbolwerk, Lepelenburg, Hieronymusplantsoen and Wilhelminapark, roughly three kilometres of bastion parkland laid out where Utrecht's old city walls used to run. Somewhere along that chain grows the thickest London plane of the lot, on the plantsoen just north of the old Sterrenwacht observatory, and a local canal-touring guide has done the measuring nobody else bothered to write down: 629 centimetres round and about 27 metres tall. The city's own monumental tree register dates the planting to the 1830s, and the independent route guide narrows that to 1835, putting the tree at around 190 years old, roughly contemporary with the observatory it now shades. It stands close enough to three other registered trees in the same bastion cluster that a visit here becomes a short walk rather than a single stop, though this one carries its own separate register number and is not to be confused with a second plane about 80 metres to the southwest. Free, public park, open during normal park hours, about 15 minutes' walk from Utrecht Centraal.