The Plane Outside the Grey House

There used to be two of them. Vienna protected a pair of oriental planes on Landesgerichtsstraße in July 1956, recording trunk girths of 2.1 and 3.6 metres, and today both the monument register and the city's tree catalogue find exactly one oriental plane on the entire street. The survivor is the bigger one, now 445 centimetres around and 21 to 25 metres tall, and its two record-keepers disagree pleasantly about its birthday: the protection decree guessed it was planted around 1835, the tree catalogue writes 1815. Either way it beat the building it stands in front of. The Landesgericht für Strafsachen, the grey slab of a criminal court Viennese people simply call the Graues Haus, went up between 1831 and 1839 on ground that had been the citizens' shooting range and, before that, the St Stephanus cemetery. So the plane was already rooted while the site was still a rifle range on the edge of town, decades before the city walls came down and the Ringstrasse was drawn. It has since spent nearly two centuries a few metres from the door people are led through on the worst day of their lives. Nobody planted it as a memorial to anything. It simply outlasted every use the ground has been put to.