ORIENTAL PLANE TREE. 
49 
The Oriental Plane (JPlatanus Orientalist deserves 
to be planted in the United States as an ornamental 
tree. It grows to the height of from 70 to 90 feet, 
with widely spreading branches and a massive trunk, 
forming altogether a majestic object. The leaves are 
more deeply divided and indented than in our common 
species. A native of the East, where shady trees are 
not so abundant as in North America, it was celebrated 
in the earliest records of Grecian history. Xerxes, it 
seems, (according to Herodotus,) was so fascinated 
with a beautiful Plane tree which he found growing in 
Lycia, that he encircled it with a ring of gold, and con- 
fided the charge of it to one of the Ten Thousand. He 
passed an entire day under its shade, encamping with 
his whole army in its vicinity, and the delay so occa- 
sioned was believed to be one of the causes of his 
defeat. Pausanius (a. d. 170) mentions a Plane tree of 
extraordinary size and beauty in Arcadia, which was 
said to have been planted by Menelaus, the husband of 
Helen, and to have been at the time he saw it 1300 
years old. 
Plane trees were planted near all the public schools 
in Athens. The groves of Epicurus, in which Aristotle 
taught his peripatetic disciples; the shady walks planted 
near the Gymnasia and other public buildings of Athens; 
and the groves of Academus, in which Plato delivered 
his celebrated discourses, were all formed of this tree. 
The remarkable Plane tree at Buyukdere, or the Great 
Valley, mentioned by Olivier, the naturalist, and after 
him by Poucqueville, Hobhouse, and various other wri- 
ters, has a trunk that presents the appearance of 7 or 8 
trees, having a common origin, which Olivier supposes 
to be the stool of a decayed tree, and which were all 
connected at their base. Dr. Walsh, who measured the 
tree in 1831, found the trunk 141 feet in circumference 
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