The Second Plane of Rathauspark

Vienna's tree register says this plane was planted in 1873. It gives that same year to every protected tree in the Rathauspark, and 1873 is when the park itself was laid out around the new town hall. That is what a register writes down when a whole park goes in at once, so the date says more about the city's paperwork than about this tree. Several of the park's trees arrived as mature stock, already grown on the day they were planted. The honest answer on age is a band rather than a year, somewhere between a century and 160 years, and nobody has counted the rings. The trunk has been measured, and it comes to 5.97 metres around, within a few centimetres of the thickest in the park. Vienna gave it individual legal protection as a natural monument in 1973, one of three planes here to get it. Even at the low end of that range it has stood through the annexation of 1938, the war, and the ten years of four-power occupation that followed, all of it playing out around the building it faces. The famous plane is at the front of the park with a legend and a disputed 1783 date attached to it. This one is at the north end doing the same work with none of the attention, a mottled grey column splitting into heavy limbs under a crown wide enough to shade that corner on its own.