The Plane of Alser Straße

A protected plane on Alser Strasse has stood for about a century and a half without ever making it into the walk Vienna's other planes did. The city's tree register puts its planting at 1894 and its trunk at 3.15 metres around, modest next to the giants of the Rathauspark a few stops away but enough on its own to earn the tree individual legal protection. Alsergrund is the district built around Vienna's old General Hospital, and this stretch of Alser Strasse runs past the hospital's former grounds, now the University of Vienna's main campus. Most of the city's protected trees cluster inside the Ringstrasse parks a kilometre south. This one stands alone on an ordinary street, marked out only by being larger than a street tree here is expected to get. It grows on the public footpath, a short walk from the U6 station that shares the street's name. The register gives no reason beyond its own measurements: no legend, no named planter, just a plane that outgrew its neighbours and got a law written around it.