The Third-Ranked Basswood of Busse Forest South

This basswood is the third biggest the Forest Preserves of Cook County have measured on their land, and it stands just 730 metres from the champion. The two are exactly the same height, 24.4 metres each. Where they part is the trunk. This one is 3.11 metres round against the champion's 3.91. Its crown, though, is the wider of the two, about 19 metres one way and 16 the other, so from a distance it may look the larger tree. Up close, the trunk tells them apart, and the register ranks this one third. That makes Busse Forest South a good place to train your eye. Walk between the two basswoods and you see how much a species can vary in one woodland: same height, same ground, eighty centimetres of trunk between them. The preserve's other ranked tree, the county's second-ranked sugar maple, stands about two and a half kilometres to the southeast and rises to 36.6 metres, half as tall again as either basswood. The register records size and place but no date of measurement and no age. Nobody has dated this tree. If you know how old it is, or have measured it yourself, tell us.