The Cemetery Plane of Singerstraße

This tree has been quietly absorbing a piece of iron fence for two and a half centuries. The plane in the Fähnrichhof, a courtyard just off Singerstraße in Vienna's old town, grew directly through part of the railing that once enclosed St Stephen's Cathedral's own graveyard, closed to burials in the 1730s. The fence is no longer visible today. Vienna's own natural monument record notes it as sealed inside the trunk by decades of callus growth, the tree's version of scar tissue closing over a wound. A 1987 expert assessment measured the trunk at two and a half metres around, the crown at ten metres across, and put the tree's age at more than 250 years even then, which makes it well past 280 today. It stands in a courtyard once attached to the Domherrenhof, the residence of St Stephen's cathedral canons, reachable on foot through a passage from Blutgasse that locals call a Durchhaus, one of the old town's many semi-hidden pedestrian shortcuts between streets. The glass door at the Blutgasse end is usually left open during the day. Almost nobody outside the neighbourhood knows this tree exists, let alone that it is quietly digesting a piece of ecclesiastical ironwork nobody has seen in living memory.