The Honey Locust of Assistens

Someone has been keeping notes on this tree since 1941. That year a Danish gardening magazine ran a feature on beautiful trees and included a honey locust in section E of Assistens cemetery. In 1949 Jens Østergaard came to measure it for a nationwide survey of Gleditsia triacanthos in Danish gardens, published in the Dendrological Society's 1952 yearbook: twelve metres tall, standing on what the surveyor recorded as former rampart ground, clay loam, listed as site number six of only thirty-five in the whole country. In November 2019 the Society came back with a GPS and a tape. Sixteen metres, 1.18 metres round, alive and healthy. Four metres of growth in seventy years is exactly what this species should manage, which is what makes the paper trail worth more than a plaque. The same tree, in the same spot, written up three times across eighty years by people with no reason to exaggerate. The thorns are what to look for, and you will have to look up. Honey locust usually arms its trunk with branched spikes at chest height. This one carries only a few, sitting two and a half to three metres up, out of reach and easy to walk straight past. Assistens opened in 1760 as a burial ground for the poor, on ground outside the city ramparts, and Hans Christian Andersen lies a few minutes' walk from here. The honey locust was rare enough in Denmark to be worth cataloguing nationally. It still is.