The Plane of the Potgietersingel

Thirty three point six metres tall, and a trunk seven point one nine metres round. Those are measured numbers, not estimates, which makes this tree the most precisely known thing on this page and one of the largest planes in the Netherlands. Seven metres of girth means roughly two and a quarter metres of diameter. Four adults with their arms out would not close a circle round it. It is standing on a defensive earthwork. Zwolle's seventeenth century fortifications were demolished in the nineteenth, as they were in almost every Dutch town, and the earth was reshaped into a ring of singels and parks. So the ground here is made ground, thrown up to stop artillery and then handed to a garden designer, and this plane has had close to two centuries of deep, loose, undisturbed soil that no city street could offer it. That is most of the explanation for the size. The other part is the species: planes tolerate everything a city can do to them, and given room they simply keep going. Bark in flaking cream and olive plates, big maple-shaped leaves, and hard bristly seed balls hanging on their stalks all winter.