The Poplar of Pettelaarse Schans

If the register's count holds, this poplar was planted around 1941, which puts it in the ground under German occupation and makes it a young tree when the fighting for the city came through in the autumn of 1944. Which planting phase it belongs to has not been written down anywhere we could find, and that stays a gap here rather than getting filled in: the fort was demolished in 1672 and reshaped into its present star in 1959, and this tree predates the second date by nearly twenty years. At 28 metres it is the tallest thing standing on the mound, with a trunk 4.18 metres round. Canadian poplar is a hybrid of the European black poplar and the American cottonwood, bred for timber and shelter belts rather than for parks, which is why it puts on height like this and why one left alone to grow old is rarer than the species' sheer commonness suggests. A second Canadian poplar stands seven metres away and is visibly slimmer, just over three metres round, so the pair separate without a tape measure. The register lists this one's vitality as reduced. The three oaks are a short way west along the same mound, which makes the Schans a walk rather than a single stop.