The Third Plane of Rathauspark

Rathauspark's plane trees carry three separate protection orders, all granted the same day in 1973, and this is the last of the set to make it onto this page. The first two already here, one with a six-metre trunk and a rumoured planting year of 1783, the other just under six metres round, get the story so far. This one is smaller, 526 centimetres, but belongs to exactly the same legal designation and stands only 55 metres from the second, close enough that a single stop in the park now takes in all three. Vienna's own tree register gives every protected tree in Rathauspark the same planting year, 1873, the year the park itself was laid out around the new town hall. That is a blanket date rather than a measurement, the kind a register writes when a whole park goes in at once, so read the resulting age, around a century and a half, as an estimate rather than a count of rings. It stands a three-minute walk from the Rathaus U-Bahn stop, free and open at any time, on the same lawn as its two sibling planes and the park's fern-leaved beech, which between them make Rathauspark one of the densest single stops on this whole page.