The Manchester Poplar

Britain's most endangered native tree is named after this city, and this is the specimen people come to see. Black poplar took the nickname Manchester poplar because it did the one thing almost nothing else managed here in the industrial century: it kept growing in the soot. Coal smoke and acid rain took the trees out of the city centre. The poplars stayed. Nobody knows how old this one is. Both sources that describe it say so outright, one of them calling its age a complete enigma, and the only hard number anyone has is the trunk: 4.07 metres round, measured for the Woodland Trust and quoted identically by both. It carries a Tree Preservation Order, and in 2023 it went onto the Woodland Trust's shortlist for UK Tree of the Year. It stands in Annie Lees Playing Fields in Gorton, a public park about twenty minutes on foot from Gorton station. One thing to know before setting off: a younger black poplar carrying the same nickname grows in St John's Gardens in the city centre, and the two are confused constantly. This is the Gorton tree, the old one. The pin marks the park rather than the trunk, so allow a few minutes of looking once you are through the gate.