The fourth species (_P. orientalis_) ranks among the noblest hardwoods of temperate Europe and Asia. Clear among memories of many sylvan scenes stand a pair of giant planes on the flank of Mount Olympus, in the leafless branches of which on a bright January morning a pair of white-tailed eagles monopolised the attention which I was intended by my Turkish host to devote to woodcocks in the copse below. Those who have sailed along the Dalmatian coast will doubtless remember the harbour of Gravosa, and the solitary plane that casts such a grateful shade across the quay. But one need not go to the Continent for giant planes. In our day it is one of the trees most commonly planted in the southern counties for shade and ornament, and has no equal for the smoke-laden atmosphere of London. It may be that it was one of Evelyn's seedlings that Bishop Gunning planted in his Garden at Ely between 1674 and 1684. This tree in 1903 was 104 feet high, with a girth of 20½ feet. Messrs. Elwes and Henry give a photograph of it in their _Trees of Great Britain and Ireland_, and consider it to be the largest specimen in our islands of the cut-leaved variety. Turner, writing in 1562, mentions "two very young trees" growing in England, which indicates the middle of the sixteenth century as the period of its introduction. A hundred years later, Evelyn says he has raised from seed-- "_Platanus_, that so beautiful and precious tree so doated on by Xerxes that Ælian and other authors tell us he made halt and stop'd his prodigious army of seventeen hundred thousand soldiers to admire the pulchritude and procerity of one of these goodly trees, and became so fond of it that he cover'd it with gold gemms, necklaces, scarfs and bracelets, and infinite riches." The maple-leaved variety, usually known as the London plane, is the sort most commonly planted in England, and rightly so, for it is more vigorous than the other. Probably the tallest in England grows at Woolbeding, in Sussex; it was 110 feet high in 1903, with a girth of 10 feet, and a clean bole of 30 feet. It would be needless to enumerate the fine planes in and near London; one has only to look at the groups beside the Admiralty and in Berkeley Square to realise how it thrives in an atmosphere pernicious to nearly all other forest growths. Fifty or sixty years hence the avenue of planes planted not long since along the Mall will be one of the sights of Europe. The skilful way in which they are being trained each to a single leader gives them a stiff, ungraceful appearance at present; but this treatment is a bit of true arboriculture, carried out in the teeth of bitter criticism. "Bairns and fules shouldna see things half dune."