The Zocher Planes of Hieronymusplantsoen

Four Oriental planes stand together on one spot in Hieronymusplantsoen, registered nationally as a single monumental entry because whoever surveyed them treated the group, not any one trunk, as the thing worth protecting. Utrecht's municipal records date the planting to 1835, part of J.D. Zocher's decades-long project to turn the old defensive moat and city walls circling Utrecht into a continuous ring of English-style landscape parks, of which Hieronymusplantsoen is one surviving stretch. Oriental plane is the straight species behind the hybrid London plane that lines most European streets, native from the Balkans to Iran and far less commonly planted in the Netherlands than its hybrid offspring. Four of them together, close to two centuries old, read as something closer to a small grove than four separate specimens, standing opposite the same building that borders the plantsoen's copper beech and, a short walk further, one of the country's most celebrated botanical gardens. They grow in the open on public parkland, unfenced, free to see any day. The register gives a single planting year for the whole group; nobody has independently dated an individual trunk within it, so treat 1835 as the group's founding date rather than a measurement of any one tree.