The Honey Locust of Section B

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.