The Bicentennial Red Oak of Mont-Royal

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.