Six of these seven stand on Mont-Royal, in the park or in the two cemeteries sharing its flank, so Montreal arrives here as a mountain rather than a city. The seventh waits at the foot of the hill on a McGill lawn, a ginkgo that a botanist who has spent twenty-five years looking picked as the most remarkable tree in the city. Up top: an Austrian pine that grew eighteen metres wide instead of tall, a silver maple that stood on a florist's field before the graves arrived, and one of the last big American elms in Montreal.
0 of 7 visited in Montreal
1
The McGill Law Ginkgo
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · roughly 120 years · Downtown / McGill campus
Asked to name the most remarkable tree in Montreal, a botanist who has spent twenty-five years looking for them picked this one, standing on a lawn beside the McGill law faculty.
Suzanne Hardy's case for it is partly the tree and partly who put it there. She believes it is likely the first ginkgo of its kind planted in Montreal, and that it went in about 120 years ago at the hands of the Olmsted family. Frederick Law Olmsted laid out Mont-Royal Park, the hill this ginkgo sits at the foot of, so the tree and the mountain above it come from the same drawing office. Six of the seven trees on this page are up on that hill. This one waits at the bottom of it.
The age is her estimate rather than a measurement. Nobody has published a girth, there is no plaque, and the pin marks the corner of Peel Street and Doctor Penfield Avenue rather than the trunk itself; the Chancellor Day Hall grounds are open to walk through and it is not a large lawn.
Ginkgos are the last surviving species of an order that otherwise ended with the dinosaurs, and they keep the habits. This one holds its leaves green into late autumn, turns them a hard uniform yellow, then drops very nearly the whole crown inside a couple of days. Arrive in the wrong week and you get a green tree or a bare one.
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2
The Bicentennial Red Oak of Mont-Royal
Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) · roughly 200 years · Mount Royal / Ville-Marie
In 1954 Mayor Jean Drapeau had much of Mont-Royal's undergrowth cut away, in a campaign remembered afterwards as the morality cuts. This oak came through it.
It is one of the ten largest oaks on the mountain: 118 centimetres across the trunk at chest height, 200 at the base, which the city's dendrological survey reads as roughly two hundred years. That measurement was taken in 2011, so the tree is somewhat wider now than the number says and the age band runs correspondingly wide. It seeded itself here rather than being planted, and it was already mature when the park was laid out around it in 1876.
You find it in a stand of white spruce about fifty years old, which makes the arithmetic obvious the moment you are standing there. Everything in sight arrived four generations after the oak did.
It is not in good health. A primary branch tore out and left a major cavity in the trunk, and the survey describes the tree as being in the twilight of its life, which is a formal way of saying go sooner rather than later. It stands off a secondary trail leading from the Olmsted Trail, and that trail is the practical instruction, because the pin is approximate. The city of Montreal's own heritage page for the mountain is the only published account of this tree; nobody else has written it up.
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3
The Great Yew of Mount Royal Cemetery
Japanese Yew (Taxus cuspidata) · over 60 years · Outremont
A Japanese yew in this climate normally manages five or six metres. This one is fifteen.
It stands on its own on a gentle slope in Mount Royal Cemetery, in a stretch where the gravestones are thinly scattered, which is what makes it findable and also what makes it worth the walk: a yew given room to become a tree instead of a hedge. The city's survey calls it the largest of its species on the mountain, at 50 centimetres across the trunk, which for a yew is a great deal of wood.
Some specialists think it is not one plant at all. The bark is oddly reddish and the crown unusually round and compact, and the theory on the record is that a male and a female were grafted together and grew on as a single tree. Nobody has taken it apart to find out.
Its age is given as over sixty years, which makes it the youngest tree on this page and does nothing to explain the height.
One caution about the address, because two cemeteries adjoin on this flank of the mountain and there is a Japanese yew recorded in the other one as well. This is the Mount Royal Cemetery tree, not the Notre-Dame-des-Neiges one. Enter from the chemin de la Foret side. The city's heritage page for it is the only published description that exists.
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4
The Wide Pine at the Cemetery Gate
Austrian Pine (Pinus nigra) · roughly 140 years · Cote-des-Neiges
This pine is 7.5 metres tall and 18 metres wide. It has spent about 150 years growing sideways.
It sits in the middle of the open ground just inside the main gate of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, which makes it the easiest tree on this page to find. Walk in and it is the thing in front of you, shaped rather more like a mushroom than a pine. The trunk is 85 centimetres across at chest height and 97 at the base.
It was planted deliberately, and early. Between about 1870 and 1872 the cemetery's administration bought thousands of trees to landscape the new pathways during its first phase of development, and this Austrian pine was one of them. That makes it part of the cemetery's opening gesture rather than something that turned up later, and it has been marking the entrance ever since, through every funeral that has come through the gate behind it.
Look at the trunk closely and it is punched with small round holes, the work of a woodpecker going after what lives under the bark. The tree does not appear to mind.
Everything known about it comes from one place, the city of Montreal's own dendrological page for this specimen. No outside source has published a word about it, which for a tree standing in plain sight at the gate of Canada's busiest cemetery is a strange gap.
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5
The Last Elm of Mont-Royal
American Elm (Ulmus americana) · roughly 120 years · Mount Royal / Ville-Marie
Montreal once had roughly 22,000 American elms. Dutch elm disease took very nearly all of them. This is one of the few still standing.
It grows on the margin of the Smith House property in Parc du Mont-Royal, on the edge next to the Olmsted Trail, and at 110 centimetres across the trunk and 128 at the base it is the largest American elm documented anywhere in the park. The city's survey reads those measurements as roughly 120 years, and the measuring was done some years ago, so add what it has grown since. It appears to have seeded itself rather than been planted, which is now an unusual biography for an elm: the ones that were planted were mostly along streets, and the streets are where the disease moved fastest.
What nobody can promise is that it will still be here. The disease has not gone anywhere, it travels between elms through root grafts and beetles, and a tree this size is a target rather than a fortress. The city's own heritage page is the only published record of this elm, and it has not been marked as lost, which is the most recent evidence there is that the tree is alive.
Treat that as a reason to go this season rather than next. If you get there and it is gone, tell us and we will take it down.
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6
The McKenna Silver Maple
Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum) · roughly 150 years · Cote-des-Neiges
This tree was here before the cemetery was. It grew on a florist's private grounds, and the graves came later.
Patrick McKenna arrived in Montreal from Ireland in 1847 and by 1851 had founded what is described as Canada's oldest florist house. The silver maple stood as an ornamental on his own horticultural property while that ground was still his field. Notre-Dame-des-Neiges incorporated in 1907, five years before he died, and the burial sections were laid out around the trunk.
Nobody wrote down the year he planted it, so the honest range is somewhere inside his sixty years on the land, which comes out at roughly 150 years. What is measured rather than inferred is the trunk: 185 centimetres across at chest height, 191 at the base, a girth of 5.8 metres. That is the second-thickest tree in the cemetery and comfortably the largest on this page.
It is in the southeast section, plot ND 7002-9030, near where chemin de la Cote-des-Neiges meets chemin Remembrance, on the edge of a burial island. The plot number is the useful part of that address: the map pin will get you to the right corner of a very large cemetery, and the number gets you the rest of the way.
The city of Montreal's survey of the mountain is the only published account of this maple.
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7
The Honey Locust of Section B
Honey Locust (Gleditsia triacanthos) · roughly 100 years · Cote-des-Neiges
The way this tree's age was worked out is that somebody read the gravestone beside it. The planting matches a death date inscribed there, which makes it a private act of commemoration by one family, and a lovely but slightly shaky way to date a tree.
Taken at face value it puts the honey locust at roughly a hundred years, give or take a decade either way. The city's survey recorded it at eighty to ninety years in 2011, so add the years since. The trunk is 65 centimetres across and 81 at the base, which made it the largest of the eleven honey locusts scattered through Notre-Dame-des-Neiges when the count was taken.
The crown is the odd part. It is displaced and asymmetrical, the whole weight of it thrown off to one side toward the dome of Saint-Joseph's Oratory on the horizon, and a long scar runs where a large branch came away. Honey locust resists rot and tolerates city air better than most trees, which is why it turns up on so many streets and why one can carry an injury like that for decades.
The address is section B, and that is as precise as the record gets, so allow time. The city's dendrological page for it is the only published description of this tree anywhere.
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