The Black Locust on Moesgård's Mound

A dead crown is not usually a reason to walk anywhere. This black locust has one, and it stands on a mound somebody built, which between them make it the strangest thing in the park. It is 4.98 metres around and 15.5 metres tall, and when the tree register surveyed it in March 2022 the verdict was alive but weak, with a large part of the crown dead and the tree weakened by age. Read that girth carefully. Black locust grows fast and thickens early, so five metres of trunk means far less here than the same figure would on an oak. The species is North American, brought to Europe in the early seventeenth century and named after Jean Robin, gardener to the French kings, and it arrived in Danish parks as an exotic with rot-proof timber and hanging white flowers in early summer. It also breaks. Brittle wood under a heavy crown is why old locusts end up looking like this one. The mound is man-made, the register says, though no source names who raised it or when. And that survey is four years old now, so a tree already shedding its crown then may have shed more since. Worth knowing before you go, and worth telling us what you find when you get there.