The Sky-Reacher of Assistens

Skyrækker, the Danish name for this species, means sky-reacher. At 15.5 metres this one does not out-top the big beeches and maples around it, but at 4.01 metres round it is the largest exotic tree the Danish Dendrological Society registered inside these cemetery walls, and the only Ailanthus they found here at all. It also comes with an open question. The surveyors who measured it in November 2019 logged its condition as levende, svag: alive, but weak. They noted severe bark scraping low on the western side of the trunk, the kind of injury that interrupts the traffic between roots and crown. Nothing found since updates that note, so what stands behind this entry is one careful observation now about seven years old. If you go and find it changed, tell us. No source gives its age either. Somewhere between sixty and a hundred and twenty years is an inference from girth alone, not a record. Ailanthus altissima reached Europe from China in the eighteenth century as a fashionable exotic and is now better known for pushing up through railway ballast and cracked concrete anywhere it can get a root down. This one was planted on purpose, in a cemetery that collected rarities, and the handkerchief tree and the ginkgo a few paths away come from the same appetite. Assistens works as a public park as much as a burial ground, and that collection is a large part of why.