The 1780 Planes of Platzspitz

Platzspitz is Zurich's second-oldest public park, laid out on the wedge of land where the Sihl and Limmat rivers meet, and its own conservation survey has tagged its plane trees by planting year with a simple system of coloured markers: brown for 1780, blue for 1806, green for 1836, red for 1960, violet for 2005. The brown-tagged cohort, planted in 1780, includes at least one specimen the city's own gardeners describe as priceless, a tree already a generation old when Napoleon's armies crossed the Rhine, and the park itself has been rebuilt and replanted around it for two centuries since. Platzspitz's own documented history as a public space runs back roughly 450 years, documented in plans and drawings, though little from the earliest layouts survives above ground; the 1780 planes are themselves already part of that long rebuilding rather than an original feature. The tagging system means a visitor with sharp eyes and no guidebook can date individual trees just by checking the colour of the marker at the base, a small piece of park bureaucracy that turns Platzspitz's plane trees into a walkable timeline of Zurich civic gardening since the late 18th century.