The Jordan Park Black Poplar

The first public playground in Europe opened on this ground in 1889, and the poplar on the ul. Reymonta side of the park is old enough that it might have been there to watch. Dr Henryk Jordan laid the place out so that the children of Krakow had somewhere to run and play games in the open, the first of its kind in the city and the first anywhere on the continent. It has been free and ungated ever since. Whether the tree predates the park is genuinely unsettled, and the honest answer is that nobody has dated it. Its trunk measures 402 cm around on the city's list of protected trees, and black poplars put on girth much faster than the oaks and limes people mentally compare a four-metre trunk against. That gives a broad ninety to a hundred and forty years, a band which straddles 1889 rather than settling it. The tree became a protected natural monument in 2010. What it does not leave in doubt is the species. Black poplar bark ridges into thick vertical cords with age, and the leaves are triangular on long flattened stalks, so the crown rustles in wind that barely moves anything else around it. If anyone holds a dated planting record for this corner of the park, we would like to see it.