The Siberian Balsam Poplar of Engelenpoortje

This poplar is not a species anyone would find growing wild anywhere. Populus x berolinensis was bred in 1865 in Berlin's botanical garden, a deliberate cross between a Siberian laurel-leaf poplar and the tall, narrow Lombardy poplar, made for exactly the trait it shows here, height with a narrow enough crown to survive in a gap between buildings barely wider than the tree itself. It grows at the Engelenpoortje, a seventeenth-century gated alley named for a long-vanished inn, De Blauwe Engel, that once stood on the corner. The alley has not had a settled recent history: redevelopment around Groningen's Grote Markt closed it to the public in 2012, and it stayed shut for eight years before reopening at the end of 2020. Whether this poplar, which the register dates to the 1930s, stood through that closure without anyone walking past it is not recorded, though a cross this vigorous would have lost little from eight quiet years. It stands today between the shops and houses the alley threads between, free to walk past on the way from Poelestraat to the Nieuwe Markt, exactly as the seventeenth-century gate always intended.