The Serkowskiego Square White Poplar

Four and a half metres of trunk, on a square almost no visitor to Krakow crosses the river to see. Plac Emila Serkowskiego is an ordinary public square in Stare Podgorze, one bridge and twenty-five minutes from the Main Square, and the white poplar standing on it has been a protected natural monument since 1997. White poplars announce themselves in a breeze. Every leaf is covered underneath in dense white felt, so a gust turns the whole crown from green to silver and back, and the bark is pale grey, pocked low down with dark diamond-shaped marks and furrowing toward the base. They also grow quickly, which is why 450 cm of circumference does not buy the age the same figure would buy on an oak. The estimate here is a wide ninety to a hundred and fifty years, worked from the girth the city's register recorded rather than from a planting document, because no planting document has turned up. That is most of what is known about it. Two written records mention the tree, the national register and the city list that reproduces it, and both run to about three lines. What neither conveys is the scale: a poplar allowed to reach four and a half metres round on a city square is not a common sight. If somebody has a date for it, we would take it.