In our country the Plane tree was once a popular tree - but when the disease, still continued, deformed the Button-wood or American Plane, the European fell into disgrace with it. Experience however shows that it is measurably free from the trouble that afflicts its American relative, and it is being again sought for by those who want to plant a tree of large spreading habit. It is not a tree for small places or very limited areas. A correspondent of the Garden thus speaks of it, as it appears in its classic home:

" The Oriental Plane seems naturally to luxuriate on the banks of streams, and I was especially struck with the magnificence of a grove of these trees in the Island of Crete, where, in a vale at the foot of the White Mountains in Sfakia, a few hours' ride from the town of Khania, watered by a copious stream, and probably getting its name, Platanus, as well as giving it to the whole vale, from the number of trees of this species growing there, the beauty of which is much enhanced by many of the largest and finest trees being held firmly in the grip of gigantic vines entwining their trunks for some feet above ground, as it were with a huge cable nearly the thickness of a man's body, and afterwards stretching out in long rope-like folds, through and over the branches to their very tops, and hanging down in long pendent festoons of bright leaves and fruit, and yet the trees seemed in good health, though they must have been held for many a long year in the grasp of these monsters. While on the subject of these trees, I may here remark, for the benefit of those who may be ignorant of the fact, that there still exists is the Island of Crete, or did so some few years ago, an evergreen variety of Plane tree, mentioned by Pliny and others, and authenticated by Admiral Spratt, whom I had the pleasure to accompany in one of his numerous visits to the island, but, though near the spot with him. he had not then re-discovered this rare and possibly very local production of nature".