The Sisi-Platane of Volksgarten

Vienna named this plane tree after an empress who famously disliked Vienna. The Sisi-Platane stands near the fountain at the heart of the Volksgarten, close to the Theseus Temple, and at an estimated 200 years old it is the oldest tree in a garden that Empress Elisabeth, who gave the tree her nickname, mostly used as a shortcut on her way to somewhere else. She preferred riding and travelling to sitting still in Viennese gardens, but the name stuck anyway. The trunk now measures roughly three and a half metres around, and the crown spans a full twenty metres in every direction, wide enough to shade a large share of the garden's central lawn on a summer afternoon. Vienna placed it under legal protection in 1951 as Naturdenkmal Nr. 376, one of a small number of individually registered trees in the first district. Its exact age has not turned up in any planting record, only an estimate based on its size, so it should be read as approximate rather than precise. What nobody disputes is its rank. Nothing else growing in the Volksgarten today is older, and few Viennese park benches offer a better patch of shade.