The Lanceleaf Cottonwood of Bispebjerg Kirkegard

The Danish tree register lists this one with question marks after its name, because there is no Danish name to give it. Populus acuminata is a North American cottonwood, a natural hybrid from the west of that continent where the broad-leaved plains poplars overlap with the narrow-leaved ones, and it has never been common enough here to earn a word of its own. The register's surveyors also noted that the leaves vary across the three trees standing together on this lawn, in how long they are against how wide, which is the sort of wobble a hybrid produces. So: an unnamed tree of a contested identity, on a cemetery lawn. It is the northernmost of that group of three, between Nordre and Sondre Kapel and nearest the northern chapel, measured in 2017 at 2.36 metres round and 20 metres tall. Bispebjerg Kirkegard is a working cemetery that Copenhagen uses as a park, open in daylight, planted with avenues of poplar, pine, ash, hornbeam and Japanese cherry. The cherry avenue a couple of hundred metres south pulls six-figure crowds every April. Nobody at all comes for this poplar, which is most of its appeal. Nobody has dated it, and the identification is the register's best call rather than a settled fact. If you know your cottonwoods, we would take a second opinion.