Platanus orientalis L.

The ancestors of Europe and western Asia’s only native Platanus are believed to have migrated from the genus’s North American heartland via western Canada, the Beringian land-bridge and northern Asia during favourable episodes in the mid-Tertiary period (at least 20 mya); the species’s nearest living relatives include P. racemosa from California, with which it still shares the five deep lobes to the leaf, which are separated by long, narrow sinuses and which are usually broadest about halfway up their length (Danika et al. 2024). These elegant ‘fingers’ lend the leaves a special delicacy, a feature which contrasts deliciously with the tree’s ultimately massive stature; the foliage tends to remain a delightfully fresh green throughout the growing season. As in all temperate Platanus, the bark sloughs off in fine, pale-coloured flakes, and aromatic oils are present in the young foliage. In P. orientalis these oils are abundant enough to scent the air around the tree, even into late summer. (All Platanus seedlings show a distinct juvenile foliage, in which the leaves are less lobed or unlobed, and more tapered at the base: the leaf-shape of sapling P. orientalis consequently resembles that of adult P. occidentalis.)

Since many London Planes (Platanus × hispanica) seem to be back-crosses with this the European parent (Grimm & Denk 2010), it is hard to define any absolute distinguishing features. In addition to the fresher-green and more aromatic summer foliage, the fruit-balls of P. orientalis (never carried singly, as they occasionally are among hybrid clones) tend to be somewhat smaller; the style is less likely to break off through autumn or winter, so that they remain more spiky in outline. The broader, lower habit of P. orientalis can also offer a clue, but such features are of course greatly dependent on the individual plant’s history and environment.

A beautiful tree which is fairly easy to grow and to transplant at larger sizes, Platanus orientalis also happens to have originated in one of the first parts of the world where humans began to plant trees, both as crops and for ornament. In addition, it is among the longest lived of deciduous trees: generally, the presence of veterans many centuries old can be taken as clear evidence that a tree species is native to a given area, but Oriental Planes have been spread around for so long that their original core distribution is hard to delineate. Oriental Planes are, for example, generally accepted to be native to southern Italy and to Sicily, and these populations account for two of the four genetic groups into which the species can be divided (Rinaldi et al. 2019), but the Italian population also includes many trees introduced since Roman times, probably from Greece (Ciaffi et al. 2022). Like the rest of their genus, Oriental Planes are characteristically waterside trees, and grow best in rich, moist, valley bottom soils, but they are remarkably tolerant so long as they are planted where underground water remains available throughout summer. In Greece this preference is shared by the autumn-flowering snowdrop Galanthus reginae-olgae – directions to find it usually include the instruction ‘look underneath planes’ (J. Grimshaw pers. comm. 2025). Some of the oldest and largest Oriental Planes follow the route of the Silk Road east from Iran as far as Kashmir, with most botanists accepting that the species is not truly native this far east. The trees in the Chor Chinor Garden in Urgut, Uzbekhistan, are supposed to be well over a thousand years old (Monumental Trees 2025); in Kashmir, the use of Chenar as shade and garden trees is said to have been popularised by the Mughal Emperors in the 16th century. However, miniatures from this period often show the trees within these gardens as already old and gnarled (Rix & Fay 2017). Probably the most massive trees in Europe are two planes planted at Trsteno in Croatia perhaps 500 years ago, a little north of the species’ accepted natural range, through the offices of a diplomat visiting from Constantinople; until topped recently for safety reasons, they were as much as 48 m tall, and both have hollow cylindrical boles nearly 4 m thick (Monumental Trees 2025).

The very biggest Oriental Planes, which grow within the species’s undisputed native heartland, are impossible to age since their trunks are completely hollow and may also have developed through the fusion of separate or regrowing stems and branches. Within the village of Ghirmizi Bazar in the disputed Caucasian region of Nagorno-Karabakh, a plane called ‘Tnjri’ (which is merely the name for the species in the local dialect) has a massively flared, fragmenting trunk nearly 9 m thick at chest height, putting Platanus orientalis among the ten tree species in the world whose biggest representatives have the greatest measurable girths; ‘Tnjri’ is guessed to be more than 2000 years old, a claim which appears entirely reasonable. Planes perhaps as old grow near Gedelme in Turkey and in the centre of the village of Krási on Crete (Monumental Trees 2025). It is quite possible that despite their immense age these are planted trees, grown for the broad canopy of shade they can provide.

The most famous ancient plane-tree grows on the Greek island of Kos and is reputed to be the tree under which Hippocrates, ‘the father of medicine’, is said to have taught in the 5th century BC, though others suggest it is a replacement; it has certainly changed little in appearance during the three centuries through which it has been well documented (Bean 1976). A massive tree at Weston Park, Staffordshire, UK, was supposed to have been grown as a cutting from the Plane of Hippocrates; this has gone now, but a scion of it in turn was planted by the late astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell at The Quinta Arboretum in Cheshire (Tree Register 2025). At least thirty other seedlings or cuttings of the Kos tree are documented, growing in countries from Canada to Brazil and from Spain to New Zealand (Wikipedia 2025).

Unusually for a wind-pollinated tree, Platanus orientalis shows little evidence of gene flow across its different Mediterranean populations; despite this, the genetic diversity of the species as a whole is relatively low (Rinaldi et al. 2019). Much of the macroscopic variation centres of the general variability of the shape of Platanus leaves, and this has led to the description of varietal forms such as var. insularis A.DC., founded on specimens from Cyprus and Crete with narrowly, lanceolate lobing, var. undulata Ait., with irregularly reflexed lobes, and var. liquidambarifolia (Spach) Jaennicke, with scarcely toothed lobes; Henry & Flood (1919) noted a population from Cyprus with completely untoothed lobes. Platanus cuneata (Willd.) describes an apparently shrubby variant from the south-eastern slopes of the Caucasus mountains which retains the cuneate or tapered leaf-bases seen in seedling trees, but this growth form can probably be explained by environmental factors (Bean 1976). Various attempts have been made to match these old names to variations in the appearance of P. orientalis as cultivated in northwestern Europe; in particular, the name ‘Digitata’ derives from George Gordon’s description in 1872 of a plane-tree sold by Loddiges’ London nursery from the 1840s, which had tiny fruit-balls c. 12 mm wide, many of whose seeds were infertile – a feature which might have been taken to indicate a hybrid origin. By the twentieth century, the identity of Loddiges’ original digitata had been forgotten (Henry & Flood 1919; Bean 1976); today, ‘Digitata’ has been recycled as a cultivar name for a variant with unusually long and slender lobes and a neat habit, which now seems to be much planted in the UK and which is described below under that name. Willdenow’s name ‘Cuneata’ has also been reused to describe specimens with quite large leaves that have particularly tapering leaf-bases. A plant was sourced as ‘Liquidambarifolia’ as recently as the turn of the 21st century for the UK National Collection of Platanus at Mottisfont Abbey in Hampshire, but has not survived (T. Geaves pers. comm.). On Crete, about 30 trees hold on to their leaves until the buds burst in spring, including one growing in the ruins of the Roman city of Gortina (Rix & Fay 2017). Rinaldi et al. 2019 used genetic fingerprinting to define four sub-populations of wild P. orientalis, one from southern Italy, one from Sicily, one from the Balkans and one from Crete, Bulgaria and Turkey, without suggesting any macroscopic features that are linked to these lineages.

Platanus orientalis is very susceptible to Canker Stain Disease (CSD), a fungal infection endemic to eastern North America which appears to have been accidentally introduced to Europe during the Second World War by way of munitions crates made out of infected timber imported from the USA (Tsopelas et al. 2017). In an attempt to isolate an infection, Oriental Planes block off their water-carrying vessels and the whole tree dies within weeks or at most a year or two; the disease is water-borne, passing from tree to tree via root connections or entering via open wounds or infected pruning equipment. By 2003, the disease had reached the wild stands of P. orientalis in southern Greece, spreading unchecked; ‘a major ecological disaster is in progress’ (Tsopelas et al. 2017). CSD has also reached epidemic proportions in Albania, and is reported from Turkey and, perhaps, from as far east as Iran. Thanks to the fungus’s relatively limited means of distribution, outbreaks can however be contained by promptly-implemented eradication measures such as felling freshly-infected trees, severing their root connections with neighbouring specimens, and injecting healthy survivors with fungicide (Tsopelas et al. 2017; Forest Research 2025).

The long history of Platanus orientalis as a cultivated plant means that it is likely to have been among the first Mediterranean trees to be introduced to northern Europe. The ‘Arbre de Diane’ in the Parc de Diane, west of Paris in France, is believed to have been planted for King Henri II around 1556 (Monumental Trees 2025). In The Names of Herbes (1548) the English botanist William Turner claimed to have seen plane-trees at Morpeth in Northumberland, where he grew up, and at Barnwell Priory in Cambridgeshire; he suggested this was among the species to have been grown in medieval monastic gardens. It is quite likely that the trees Turner remembered seeing had really been Acer pseudoplatanus (Bean 1976); conversely, it would have been impossible for one man to ascertain with any confidence which trees were and which were not being growing in Britain at this time.

Still in England, three huge Platanus orientalis surviving in a field at Hawstead Place Farm, Suffolk, are reputed to have been planted in 1578, the year when the long-lost Hawstead Place was renovated in preparation for a visit by Queen Elizabeth I; another of similar size in the private garden at Burghley (Cambridgeshire) is supposed to be associated with Sir William Cecil in the 1580s, or with John Tradescant the Elder (c.1610). Slightly better documented is a tree at Christ Church College, Oxford, said to have been planted by the biblical scholar Edward Pocock in 1636, on his return from Syria to take up a teaching post at the University. (Pocock is credited with introducing Cedrus libani to British cultivation at about this time.) Today, like many of the biggest cultivated plane-trees, Pocock’s plane shows few signs of age and is curiously lopsided, either due to the space available to it in youth or, perhaps, because the current tree represents a layer that took root at the margin of the crown of the original. Two other historic specimens, at Jesus and Emmanuel Colleges in Cambridge, were apparently raised from seed collected at the battle site of Thermopylae in Greece in 1802 by Edward Daniel Clarke (Tree Register 2025). Largest of all, with a bulbous bole very nearly 3 m dbh in 2014, is a tree in the garden of Rycote Park, Oxfordshire, which lacks any recorded history, but could conceivably be as old as the apparently medieval yew (Taxus baccata) in the adjoining chapel graveyard (Tree Register 2025).

Like all Platanus, the Oriental Plane likes plenty of warmth through the growing season, limiting its use in the far north-western fringes of Europe. In Scotland, much the largest (23 m × 136 cm diameter at 0.7 m in 2017) grows in the kindly conditions of the Carse of Gowrie at Glendoick, Perthshire, and is said to have been grown from seed collected by Euan Cox while serving at Gallipoli in Turkey during the First World War (Tree Register 2025). Elwes & Henry (1906–1913) even reported mature trees killed by winter cold in Scotland, though poor growth in the previous season must have been an underlying cause. Milder winters are at least improving Oriental Plane’s odds in Scotland even if the summers are still not warm enough to please London Plane. Trees grown from seed gathered in Lebanon in 2011 (CBDK 71) are growing at a remarkable rate in the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (T. Christian pers. comm.).

All of the mature trees mentioned above grow in landscape gardens with plenty of space, rather than in the confined urban situations where the hybrid descendents of Platanus orientalis have found their home. The Oriental Plane is by nature a remarkably spreading tree, and often a low one. The UK’s broadest individual tree is an Oriental Plane in the garden of Corsham Court in Wiltshire, which has layered across the area of a football field (about 60 m average diameter); this specimen may date from around 1761, when Corsham’s new owner Paul Smythe commissioned Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown to landscape the grounds. A seedling brought back by Henry John Elwes in a bottle in 1874 from the Temple of Ephesus in Greece and planted in a field on his Colesbourne estate in Gloucestershire is an exceptional case, being still only 9 m tall in 2018 with a tangle of crooked, widely spreading limbs; Elwes recounted that it had been cut back by frost in most of its early winters (Elwes & Henry 1906–1913; Tree Register 2025). It is planted just too low on the slope and is subject to a severe frost pocket (J. Grimshaw pers. comm. 2025), but nevertheless its characterful form led it to being named one of 70 Ancient Trees for Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee by The Queen’s Green Canopy campaign in 2022 (alongside the erroneous information that it was collected from a Chinese emperor’s tomb). An even more remarkable and somewhat younger Oriental Plane at Hergest Croft in Herefordshire, again planted in a field with ample room to spread, was only 8 m tall in 2023 and has formed a broad and highly attractive parasol of dense foliage on branches which droop to the ground all round. (One of the oldest plane-trees in Turkey, at Ülübat Gölü near Bursa, is known as the ‘weeping plane’ (Ağlayan çinar), but has widely spreading horizontal rather than hanging branches – Rix & Fay 2017.) By contrast, a veteran Oriental Plane at Hampton Court Castle in Herefordshire is 34 m tall, with a crown as shapely and upstanding as some of the best London Planes (Tree Register 2025).

A specimen planted in 1850 at Tortworth Court in Gloucestershire closely resembles the so-called Baobab Group of Platanus × hispanica, with disproportionately small and twisting branches above a massively burred short trunk 2.15 m thick by 2015. An older ‘false baobab’ at Woodstock Park in Kent has a longer bole which tapers abruptly and was just over 2 m thick at 2 m up, above the taper, in 1999 (Tree Register 2025). At Château le Kinnor in Brittany, France, the comparably shaped bole of a gigantic tree which lacks a recorded history has a dbh of nearly 4 m (Monumental Trees 2025).

Through the 20th century, Oriental Planes began to be selected for their straighter and slenderer growth, allowing them, particularly if trained to a good straight stem in the nursery and sold as large standards, to be fitted into broad streets. ‘Minaret’ is one named clone; more widespread are trees grown as ‘Digitata’ (a name which should not be confused with the plant sold by Loddiges in the 19th century). A young plane grown at Grayswood Hill in Surrey from seed from Kashmir in 1900 was described by Elwes & Henry (1906–1913) as fastigiate in habit, but has not survived.

The role of Platanus orientalis as an ornamental tree in North America has been much less illustrious, partly because there has been insufficient time for any plantings to attain the majesty of the biggest specimens in Europe, and partly presumably because the species’s vulnerability to CSD, for which the American P. occidentalis is the natural host species, will have resulted in many unexplained deaths in the years before CSD was scientifically described in the 1930s. However, P. orientalis is reliably resistant to Plane Anthracnose, which tends to be more of a problem in the Eastern United States than it is in Europe; MAJESTIC BEAUTY™ is one Oriental Plane to have been marketed in the United States, with anthracnose resistance listed among its selling points (Jacobson 1996).

Oriental Planes have been grown in New Zealand since 1870 at least (Christchurch City Council 2025), and have been reported to naturalise there (Ogle 2016).They are also recommended for their performance in southern Australia (occasionally under the curious name ‘Chilensis’).

Many of the world’s longest lived trees grow slowly in their youth; this is not true of Platanus orientalis. Maurice Foster’s remarkable arboretum at White House Farm in Kent, England, includes an Oriental Plane planted in 1993 from seed collected in Turkey by the late Kenneth Ashburner; by the age of 26 it had developed a full crown 22.5 m tall (Tree Register 2025). In Greece, Platanus orientalis has been trialled, alongside P. × hispanica, for its potential in biomass production (Aravanopoulos 2010).

Across its natural range the foliage of Platanus orientalis has found a variety of uses in traditional herbal medicine, treating eye conditions, dysentery, wounds and chillblains; the bark, boiled in vinegar, has also been used to treat diarrhoea, hernias and toothache (Fern 2025).

Although it is easy to raise from seed, Platanus orientalis is much harder than most of its hybrid descendents to propagate by cuttings. A success rate of 10% is typical for cuttings taken in November and overwintered outside, particularly if there are damaging late frosts; for P. × hispanica, the same process can meet with a 90% success rate (G. Locke pers. comm.).