The Second Oak of Summit Woods

When McGill University bought the top of Westmount hill in 1895 to keep it from being built on, this oak was already about thirty years old. The observatory the university had in mind never went up. In 1940 it sold the hill to the City of Westmount on the condition that the land stay a park or playground in perpetuity, and that deed is why the summit carries hardwood forest instead of houses. The city's heritage survey measured the tree in 2011 at 114 centimetres through the trunk, roughly 3.6 metres round, and put it at over 145 years then, so over 160 now. It ranked as the second-largest oak in Summit Woods. The wood around it is a red oak, sugar maple and white ash mix that the city calls rare in the Montreal area today, surviving almost nowhere but this mountain. It stands along the main trail near the summit and can be seen from the path without leaving it. Two more thick red oaks are recorded here, further down a steep unmaintained slope, which is a different kind of walk altogether. A late black cherry grows on the same easy stretch. The tree's own figures come from that single official survey, which is why the age here is a band rather than a date, and why the pin marks the stretch of trail rather than the exact trunk.