The Poplar of the Eleanor Rooseveltlaan

Hardly anyone lets a Canadian poplar reach this age. The register puts this one's planting between 1900 and 1910, which makes it about 120, and the species is normally out of the ground long before that. Populus x canadensis is a hybrid of an American poplar and a European one, bred for speed, and it went into the Dutch landscape in enormous numbers along roads, dykes and field edges. It makes height in a decade and shelter in two. What it does not make is old bones: the wood is soft, heavy limbs come out in a gale, and most street poplars are taken down at fifty or sixty on exactly that reasoning. This one is still standing in a strip of municipal garden on the Eleanor Rooseveltlaan in Amstelveen. Roosevelt herself was a young woman in New York when it was planted. The register knows nothing else about it. Under the tree's own history it records a single word: unknown. Nobody wrote down who put it there, or why a fast nursery hybrid on a suburban corner was left alone long enough to end up on a national list of monumental trees. If you know that story, tell us. Come on a windy day. Poplar leaves hang on flattened stalks that let them twist edge-on to a gust, so a crown this size does not rustle so much as pour.