The Japanese Pagoda Tree of Rolighedsvej

Somebody took this tree apart and it carried on anyway. When the Danish Tree Register surveyed the corner of Rolighedsvej and L.I. Brandes Alle in June 2022, it recorded a Japanese pagoda tree pruned hard a few years earlier and carrying large bark wounds down the south and east sides of the lowest two metres of trunk. It also recorded it as alive. What survived is 3.15 metres round and 12 metres tall, standing on open pavement immediately east of Sankt Thomas Kirke in Frederiksberg, which is a busy street corner rather than a park. No source outside the register carries it. Nobody has dated it, and on a tree that has lost this much wood the usual trick of reading age from girth would be guesswork rather than arithmetic, so the honest answer here is that we do not know. The species is worth the corner anyway. Styphnolobium japonicum has fine pinnate leaves, a dozen or more small leaflets to a stalk, that come out late and give the crown an open, almost dusty look through the summer. Then it flowers in August, cream clusters in the weeks when the limes and chestnuts around it are long finished, and a scarred street tree spends a fortnight looking like the best thing on the block.