The Rijksmuseum Poplar

This poplar was planted as architecture. The Rijksmuseum opened in 1885 and the ground around it was laid out as an outdoor annexe of the collection, filled with fragments rescued from demolished Dutch buildings: gateways, doorframes, a pavilion. Early in the twentieth century a line of Italian poplars went in to frame one of those historic gates, and this is one of them. The choice makes sense the moment you look at the tree. Populus nigra 'Italica' barely spreads. It grows as a narrow column, which is why it was planted in rows across Europe for two centuries to line roads, mark boundaries and give flat country a vertical. In a garden of salvaged stone doorways it does the work of a pilaster. The register puts the planting between 1910 and 1920, so it is around 110 years old, and for this cultivar that is a considerable age. Lombardy poplars are fast, soft-wooded and short-lived by the standards of the trees on this page, and most of those planted in the same decade elsewhere in Europe are long gone. This one stood through the wartime evacuation of the museum's collection to shelters outside the city, and through the ten-year rebuild that gutted the building and reopened it in 2013, while the garden around it was redesigned more than once. Free, with the garden. The Jan Luijkenstraat side is the quiet way in.