Vancouver's own heritage register tracks its remarkable trees by street address, not by park, and what turns up is civic survivors rather than old-growth giants: an oak that has held one corner of City Hall's lawn since the building opened, a magnolia pair the city rescued from a bulldozer, the widest Caucasian wingnut on Vancouver's street-tree books, and a run of thick-trunked beeches, chestnuts and oaks on ordinary residential streets. None carries a confirmed planting date older than about a century, and the register says so honestly.
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The City Hall Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · about 90 years · Mount Pleasant (Vancouver City Hall grounds, southwest corner)
Vancouver's heritage register lists this oak the way it lists buildings, and two accounts explain how it got there. They cannot both be right. Nature Vancouver's survey of the City Hall grounds says a small oak was planted in 1936, the year the building opened during the city's golden jubilee, and that it now fully occupies the southwest corner of the lawn. The Vancouver Heritage Foundation's page for the address says something else: that King George presented an oak on a visit in 1945. That version trips over its own date. George VI came to British Columbia once, on the royal tour of May 1939, and he did not travel to Canada again after the war. We have taken the 1936 planting as the likelier of the two, which puts the tree at about ninety, and anyone holding the paperwork that settles it should tell us.
The corner, at least, is not in dispute. City Hall went up in the depths of the Depression and opened in 1936 for the city's fiftieth birthday, and the oak has been filling its southwest corner through every argument the building has hosted since. Nobody has put a tape around the trunk. If you do, tell us what it reads.
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The Normal School Red Oak
Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) · Fairview
The city's heritage register carries one line about this tree: Northern Red Oak, 501 West 12th Avenue. No age, no girth, no account of who put it there, and nothing else written about it anywhere we have looked, which is unusual for a tree on a register at all. So take what follows as the address talking rather than the tree.
That address is the Provincial Normal School, built in 1908 and 1909, a normal school being a teacher training college; British Columbia sent its future schoolteachers here. The building was given municipal heritage protection in 1986, and in 1989 Paul Merrick Architects put a shopping centre around it rather than over it, which is why the school's brick front still faces West 12th from inside a mall called City Square. The oak stands out on the grounds, a minute from the Broadway-City Hall SkyTrain entrance and a short walk along the same street from City Hall's own listed oak, which makes the two of them one easy stop.
Quercus rubra is an eastern North American tree and did not reach this coast on its own, so somebody planted it on purpose. When, nobody appears to have recorded, and the school's dates are not an answer for the tree. If you know, tell us.
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3
The Comox Street Wingnut
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · over a century · West End
Vancouver's street tree inventory has 43 wingnuts on its books, and this one, on a residential corner in the West End, is the largest Caucasian wingnut among them. The city measured the trunk at 116.8 centimetres across, which is about 367 centimetres around, under a crown 13.7 metres up. The runner-up, out on Yew Street, is five centimetres narrower.
Pterocarya fraxinifolia is a walnut relative from the Caucasus and the forests along the Caspian in northern Iran, and it has one unmistakable trick. Through July and August it hangs chains of winged nutlets from the branch tips, green strings half a metre long, and on a street tree like this one they hang low enough to take in a hand. Out of season, look for the deeply furrowed trunk and the long compound leaves; from a distance a wingnut is easy to walk past as a big ash.
The Heritage Vancouver Society put it in a 2006 newsletter round-up of the city's heritage trees worth the walk, with its own photograph. Nobody has dated it. The trunk points to a century or more, but this genus puts on girth quickly, so a thick wingnut is not automatically an old one and the number should be held loosely. If the century is right, it kept this corner while the West End around it went from houses to apartment towers.
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4
The Planetarium Magnolias
Saucer Magnolia (Magnolia x soulangeana) · about 114 years, planted 1912 · Kitsilano (Vanier Park)
These two magnolias spent two years parked in a landscape contractor's garden because he would not destroy them. In 1966 the province wanted the ground they stood on, outside the old Vancouver Court House downtown, for a new government fountain, and the pair was scheduled for disposal. The public objected loudly enough that the contractor hired to clear the site, K. Johnsen, moved the trees to his own property instead. In 1968 the Vancouver Park Board acquired them and replanted them in Vanier Park, flanking the two ramp entrances of what was then the H.R. MacMillan Planetarium and is now the Space Centre. The courthouse they were dug out of is today the Vancouver Art Gallery.
They went in as young trees in 1912, which puts them a little past a century; that figure comes from the recorded planting date rather than from anything measured on the trunk. A saucer magnolia is a hybrid raised outside Paris in the 1820s and named for the man who made it, Soulange-Bodin, and it flowers the way that reputation suggests: in late March and April, before a leaf appears, both trees fill with pink and white goblets on bare grey wood.
The rescue is set down in a 2006 Heritage Vancouver Society newsletter, the one detailed account of these trees we have found. The city register still lists them as a single line, and there are two of them, one at each ramp.
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5
The Dunbar Street Beech
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · roughly 150 to 300 years, judged from a trunk 4.19 m round · Kitsilano (Dunbar Street near West 1st/2nd Avenue)
Vancouver's heritage register is mostly buildings. It also keeps a category for landscape resources, and one entry on it is a single beech standing on the boulevard outside 1711 Dunbar Street.
Two separate arms of the same city have looked at that tree and agree on it. The heritage register calls it a beech and stops there. The street-tree inventory, a survey run for asset management rather than for history, records one European beech at the identical address: 133.4 centimetres of trunk diameter, which is about 4.2 metres round, and 19.8 metres of height. It lists no other tree at the address, so there is no question which one carries the listing.
Four metres of girth is well beyond the usual run of urban beech, which spend their lives with their roots under pavement. This one does too, on a quiet residential street in Kitsilano, on public ground, free to walk up to at any hour. Come in late October or November and the whole crown goes copper and russet.
What nobody has written down is its age. Neither dataset records a planting date and no independent account of the tree exists, and we would rather leave the field empty than fit a number to the girth without a growth rate we trust for beech on this coast. If you know when Dunbar Street got its beech, tell us.
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6
The West 20th Avenue Spanish Chestnut
Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa) · Arbutus Ridge
There are two Spanish chestnuts on West 20th Avenue, and the heritage-listed one is the smaller. The city's street-tree inventory gives it a trunk 104.1 centimetres in diameter, about 3.3 metres round, and 19.8 metres of height; the unlisted chestnut a block away at number 2089 is thicker, at 124.5 centimetres. Fame and girth do not always travel together.
The city cannot quite agree where the listed one lives. Its heritage register records a Spanish Chestnut at 2001 West 20th Avenue. Its separate street-tree survey records a Spanish chestnut at 2003, one house number along, and finds no other chestnut at this end of the block. Almost certainly the same tree, counted twice by two departments working from two sets of paperwork. Almost certainly is the honest phrase: this pass could not settle it on the ground.
Castanea sativa is the sweet chestnut of Europe, which Vancouver's register files under its other name. This one grows on a city boulevard on the public right-of-way, free to walk up to at any hour. In October the spiny burs split and the nuts come down, which is the moment worth timing the walk for.
Nobody has recorded its age. Neither city dataset carries a planting date and no independent account of the tree turned up. If you have lived on the block long enough to know, tell us.
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7
The Blenheim Street Oak
Oak (Quercus sp.) · Dunbar-Southlands
Vancouver's heritage register lists a pin oak at 4010 Blenheim Street. Vancouver's street-tree inventory, run by another department for another purpose, records no pin oak at 4010 Blenheim Street at all. What it records is five trees sharing that one civic address: two red oaks, two American elms and a young hackberry.
The tree on this page is the larger of the two red oaks, 127 centimetres in diameter, about 4 metres round, and 19.8 metres tall. Four metres of oak is a serious tree on a residential boulevard whichever species it turns out to be, and it is the likeliest candidate for the heritage listing: pin oak and red oak are both lobed red oaks and are confused constantly, in registers as much as in gardens.
The other possibility is that the register's pin oak stands on the private frontage of the lot, where the street-tree survey does not go, and that the tree we are pointing you at is its unlisted neighbour. Neither dataset settles it. If you know the block and can say which oak is which, tell us, because you can answer that from the pavement in about ten seconds and we cannot answer it from here at all.
No planting date or age is recorded for any of the five trees at the address, so the years this one has been standing there are nobody's number yet.
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