The Class of '49 Tulip Tree

McGill's graduating class of 1949 left a tree behind, and it is still standing beside the Redpath Museum. That makes it unusual company on this map. Almost every tree here carries an estimated age, worked back from a trunk measurement or a register's planting band. This one has a documented year, so the count is simply 77. A tulip tree is an odd thing to find growing this far north. The species is rare in Quebec and close to the limit of the cold it will take, which is most of the reason the city put this specimen on its remarkable-tree list at all. The survey measured it at 64 centimetres through the trunk, about two metres round. Elsewhere the species reaches three times that thickness, so this is not a giant of its kind; it is a good one in a place where good ones are scarce. It grows in an oval of mixed species planted around a sunken island of grass on the lower campus, which means it has spent its whole life watching students cut the corner across the same lawn. The black walnut at the Roddick Gates and the ginkgo further into the campus are both a few minutes away, so the three of them make one short errand. One source documents this tree, the city's own heritage register, and the pin is approximate.