The Founding Plane of Rathauspark

The oldest tree in front of Vienna's City Hall is older than the building itself by exactly one century. Two records disagree about this tree by ninety years. Tradition puts it in the ground in 1783, when the site was open land beyond the city. The city's own tree register says 1876, three years after the park was laid out, and gives that same year to every monument here, which is what a register writes down when a park is planted at once. Nobody has counted its rings. Construction of the neo-Gothic town hall did not start until 1872, and the park was landscaped around the new building only after that, which means this tree had already been growing for close to ninety years by the time the space around it became a park at all. It has since grown into a trunk six metres around and a crown thirty metres tall, big enough that Vienna's own tree registry lists it, under catalogue number 252, as Rathauspark's oldest specimen without qualification. It is one of three plane trees in the park with individual legal protection as natural monuments, granted in 1973. Office workers on lunch break, tourists cutting through on their way to the Burgtheater, and the occasional wedding photographer all pass beneath a canopy that was already mature when Mozart was writing his last symphonies, in a park that did not exist yet to contain it.