I bet at some time in your life you’ve pulled a great peeling flake of bark off that eccentric and iconic city tree Platanus x acerfolia, better known as – the London Plane. 
It makes up over half the trees in the city, is so distinctive, with its camouflage coloured trunk, huge leathery leaves like great alien hands, and pretty bobble fruit which dot the bare branches through winter, that we take it for granted. 
We shouldn’t though because this tree is special – it’s London born and bred and nearly didn’t exist if it hadn’t been for a happy accident that took place in a 17th century garden centre.
Gardeners owe a lot to the work of both John Tradescant the Elder (1570s-16380)and his son, John the Younger, but that’s another story. The thing is they had a fantastic botanic garden and nursery in Vauxhall full of rare plants they collected from all over the world. It seems that among his stock of trees he had some American Sycamore which had first been introduced to Britain in the early 17th century as well as some wonderful Oriental Planes which had been here since at least 1548. Nature did its thing and these two ‘foreigners’ produced a new hybrid which had a special and useful quality: it was pollution resistant. The peeling bark could just slough off soot and grime and the waxy leaves washed well in the rain, its root system doesn’t mind being squashed and it’s not fussy about the soil it grows in. So you can see why this beautiful tree has become such a favourite in cities – in fact it’s a great British export growing wonderfully from New York to Nanjing as pictured here.
