The Venediger-Au-Park Plane

The thickest tree in the Venediger-Au-Park was protected only in 2012, when it was already more than a century and a half old. Vienna made this London plane Natural Monument 781 that August, and the reason on the list is its role in the landscape: the park would look like a different place without it. The trunk explains why. The city's tree cadastre puts it at 5.46 metres round, which is a very heavy plane by any city's standard, and records a planting year of 1849. That year is the cadastre's entry rather than a planting document, so we give it as a band, roughly 150 to 200 years. If 1849 is right, the plane went into the ground a year after the revolution of 1848 shook Vienna. Since then it has outlasted a great deal of the Leopoldstadt around it. It was here when the Danube was straightened in the 1870s, and here while the district's Jewish community grew into one of the largest in Europe and was then destroyed in the 1930s and 1940s. The tree stood through all of it in what is now a small neighbourhood park, and for most of that time nobody wrote it down. The other big trees here are a 1914 lime and a 1921 ash, both around three metres round. Next to them this one looks like it belongs to an older map, which it does.