The Roddick Gates Black Walnut

McGill's own alumni magazine once described this tree as peering in the windows of the Redpath Museum. That was in 2001, and it is still doing it. The black walnut stands just inside the Roddick Gates, in the line of trees along Sherbrooke Street West at the front of the lower campus. The city's heritage survey puts its trunk at 82 centimetres across at chest height, about 2.6 metres round, and rates both its physiological and its structural health as excellent, which is a generous report card for a tree that has spent its life on the edge of a downtown street. The age needs a caveat. The survey says it was planted at the turn of the century, a phrase that in French can point at either end of the nineteenth. Read against the same page's own note that the tree is more than a hundred years old, it lands at roughly 1900 to 1910, so over 110 years now. Nobody has narrowed it further, and the band here stays wide because of it. That is more than a century of students coming through the gates underneath it. Black walnut is not a common street tree in Montreal, and while the species can grow half as thick again as this one, a trunk this size on Sherbrooke Street is worth the two minutes it takes to stop.