Garden & avenue classics
London Plane
Platanus × acerifolia
If you live on a leafy street in Melbourne's inner east, odds are you're looking at London planes. They line more Melbourne streets than any other tree, chosen a century ago for their tolerance of smoke, drought and hard pruning, and they've grown into the arching green tunnels that define suburbs like Malvern and Camberwell.
How to spot a london plane
Bark
The giveaway. Mottled patches of cream, olive and grey that flake away like camouflage, brightest on the upper trunk and limbs.
Leaves
Broad and maple-like with three to five pointed lobes, arranged alternately along the twig. Fresh green in spring, leathery by summer.
Fruit
Spiky round seed balls about the size of a golf ball, hanging in ones and twos on long stalks and staying on the bare tree through winter.
Form
Tall and arching, commonly 20 to 30 metres in avenues, often with a clean straight trunk from decades of street-tree pruning.
Season
Fine hairs shed from new spring leaves are a known hay fever trigger. Autumn colour is a quiet golden brown rather than a fireworks show.
Where you'll see it around the south east
Almost every avenue in the inner east has them: the shopping strips of Glenferrie Road and High Street, the residential streets of Malvern, Armadale and Camberwell, and formal plantings across the CBD and St Kilda Road. Gardens inherit them too, where street plantings have seeded or where a previous owner wanted instant shade.
Worth knowing
The London plane is a hybrid of the American sycamore and the oriental plane, made famous by industrial-era London because it shrugged off coal soot when little else survived. That same toughness is why Melbourne councils planted it by the tens of thousands.
Easily confused with
Maples have similar leaves but arrange them in opposite pairs, where plane leaves alternate. Liquidambars have star-shaped leaves with a corky-ridged branch and carry their spiky seed balls singly. Nothing else in Melbourne has the plane's flaking camouflage bark.
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