The Black Poplar of the Ramparts

True wild black poplar has all but disappeared from the Flemish landscape, and what survives of it is mostly old pollards in hedgerows, beside ponds and streams and field edges. This one was put into a landscaped park on purpose, which the heritage inventory itself flags as an odd place to find the species. It went in during 1853, while Bruges was converting the ring of its old defences into the walking circuit that still goes round the town. A survey in 2009 recorded the stem at 464 centimetres round at chest height, the tree at 22 metres tall, and the crown at 13 metres across. That girth makes it comfortably the thickest tree on this page, and at 173 years it is the oldest one here carrying a date. Populus nigra is a riverside tree and behaves like one. It grows fast on soft wood, hollows early and starts shedding limbs at an age when an oak is still filling out, so old ones are scarce even where the species is not. Across Europe most of what looks like black poplar is now hybrid, bred for timber and planted in rows. Only Flanders' heritage inventory records any of this, the 1853 planting included, so the whole entry rests on one source.