The McKenna Silver Maple

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.