The Canadian Poplar of Vosseparkje

Canadian poplars are planted because they grow fast, and most of them are taken down long before they get to the age of this one. The register dates this tree to between 1890 and 1900, which makes it about 130 years old: a hybrid poplar that outlived the reason it was chosen. It has been on the west side of the Vosseparkje since a generation before the park took its present shape in the 1926 redesign, and the paperwork on it reads like a medical file. In 2007 its crown had grown heavy enough that thinning was advised. A check in 2016 found it standing, with damage at the foot of the trunk where asphalt work had come too close. That 2016 note is the most recent word anybody has written about it, and it is ten years old, so if you walk past we would like to hear that the tree is still there. Leeuwarden has one other Canadian poplar on the national register, a named cultivar in the Prinsentuin on the far side of the centre. That one gets the walking routes and the brochures. This one, the plain hybrid at the edge of a small park, gets a line in a register and a note about the asphalt.