Platan

Platan has survived everything the city invented: coal smoke, car exhaust, pruning saws, pavement poured to the very trunk. The London plane's camouflage bark exfoliates in patches — cream, olive, brown — shedding the year's grime like a snake sheds skin, which is exactly how it survives air that kills lesser trees. "The city tries to write on me," they say, "and I peel off the writing." They are the Painted Bark's urban correspondent, sending reports from the front: the pigeons, the bus fumes, the child who carved initials that exfoliated away by spring. The faction finds them eccentric; Platan finds the faction sheltered. "You trade in appearances," they tell the rainbow eucalypts. "I survive them." Their bark this year is particularly fine — a map of everywhere the city tried, and failed, to leave a mark.