366 THE PLANE TREE. 
that time; and it frequently attains the height of thirty feet 
in fifteen or eighteen years. A tree of this species in the 
palace garden at Lambeth is recorded to have grown, near a 
pond, to the height of eighty feet in twenty years. Perhaps 
the tallest tree of the species in Britain is one at Chelsea 
Hospital Gardens, where it extends its roots towards the 
Thames; it is 115 feet high, with a trunk five feet in dia- 
meter at a foot above the ground. 
