The Plane of the Westzijde

A plane tree handles dirty air by taking its skin off. The bark comes away in irregular plates, carrying the year's soot and grime with it, which leaves the trunk mottled in olive, cream and grey and is the reason this species ended up lining the streets of every industrial city in Europe. Zaandam was a good place to need that trick. The Zaan district ran first on wind and then on coal: hundreds of mills sawing timber, crushing seed for oil and grinding pigment for paint, and after them the cocoa and biscuit works whose smell still carries across the town on the right wind. The register puts this plane's planting between 1900 and 1910, which sets it down in the middle of all that. Everything around it has since changed. The register's note on the tree is really a note about its neighbours: the Zaan bank is under heavy development, and this early twentieth-century plane has outlasted those developments for well over a century now. The mills, the wharves and most of what it was planted beside have gone. Planes are hybrids, oriental plane crossed with American sycamore, and in city terms they are close to indestructible. Cut back to stumps they come again, which is precisely why councils keep planting them. This one stands on the public square at the Westzijde; the pin marks the square rather than the trunk itself.