The Wide Pine at the Cemetery Gate

This pine is 7.5 metres tall and 18 metres wide. It has spent about 150 years growing sideways. It sits in the middle of the open ground just inside the main gate of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, which makes it the easiest tree on this page to find. Walk in and it is the thing in front of you, shaped rather more like a mushroom than a pine. The trunk is 85 centimetres across at chest height and 97 at the base. It was planted deliberately, and early. Between about 1870 and 1872 the cemetery's administration bought thousands of trees to landscape the new pathways during its first phase of development, and this Austrian pine was one of them. That makes it part of the cemetery's opening gesture rather than something that turned up later, and it has been marking the entrance ever since, through every funeral that has come through the gate behind it. Look at the trunk closely and it is punched with small round holes, the work of a woodpecker going after what lives under the bark. The tree does not appear to mind. Everything known about it comes from one place, the city of Montreal's own dendrological page for this specimen. No outside source has published a word about it, which for a tree standing in plain sight at the gate of Canada's busiest cemetery is a strange gap.