All eight of these trees stand within half a kilometre of Parliament Hill, across Confederation Square, Confederation Park and Major's Hill Park. Canada's National Capital Commission keeps an official register of remarkable trees for the whole capital region, and this cluster holds a lime beside the National War Memorial, a rare pair of vine-leaved limes, an American yellowwood far north of its native range, and a trio of Serbian spruce. Three carry a roughly 125-year estimate tied to one planting programme around 1900; the rest have never been dated.
0 of 8 visited in Ottawa
1
The Response Linden
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · not documented · Downtown / ByWard core
The memorial this linden stands beside was built for one war and unveiled three months before the next one began. King George VI pulled the cover off it in May 1939, in front of a crowd of 100,000. The monument has a formal name, The Response, and it shows twenty-two bronze figures hauling a field gun and its team through a granite arch, soldiers and nurses and airmen pressed together in the gap. In 2000 the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was set into the ground in front of it, holding a Canadian recovered from a cemetery near Vimy Ridge whose name was never established.
The tree is the quiet part of all that. It stands at the memorial end of Confederation Square, a small-leaved lime with the dense rounded crown the species makes when nobody interferes with it, and it is the only thing in that square that changes with the season while the bronze does not. Every 11 November the national ceremony fills the ground beneath it. For the rest of the year it shades office workers eating lunch on the steps of the busiest traffic island in the country.
When it was planted, nobody wrote down. The capital's register of remarkable trees names the tree and gives it no date, and no other source has anything to say about this particular one. If you know its age, tell us.
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2
The Vitifolia Linden (west of the pair)
Large-leaved Lime 'Vitifolia' (Tilia platyphyllos 'Vitifolia') · roughly 125 years · ByWard Market / Major's Hill
Look up and the leaves look wrong for a lime. This is the Vitifolia cultivar of the large-leaved lime, selected for foliage that is broad, blunt-toothed and lobed enough to pass for a grapevine, which is what the name means. Two of them stand in Major's Hill Park about thirty-five metres apart, and they are the only ones the capital's register of remarkable trees lists anywhere in Ottawa. This is the western tree of the pair.
By the register's account both were held in the Central Experimental Farm nursery around 1897 and put in the ground here in or around 1900, which makes them roughly 125 years old. The hedging is the register's own and it stays: that one document is the only thing dating either tree. The man behind the planting is not in doubt. William Saunders ran the Dominion Experimental Farms from 1886 to 1911 out of the farm across town, and the nursery he built there supplied the stock that turned a working river port into somewhere a government could plausibly sit.
Major's Hill Park has been public ground since the 1870s, on the bluff where the Rideau Canal drops through its locks to the Ottawa River. The lime has stood through the whole modern life of the park, and from underneath it you look straight across the cut at Parliament Hill.
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3
The Vitifolia Linden (east of the pair)
Large-leaved Lime 'Vitifolia' (Tilia platyphyllos 'Vitifolia') · roughly 125 years · ByWard Market / Major's Hill
Ottawa's register of remarkable trees lists exactly two vine-leaved limes in the city, and this is the eastern one. Its twin stands thirty-five metres away across the grass. The cultivar carries the name Vitifolia because the leaves are cut like a grape's, big and coarse and nothing like the neat heart-shaped leaf most people picture on a lime. In the last week of June the crown hums: limes flower late, the scent carries, and every bee in the park works the tree at once.
The dating comes from a single source, the National Capital Commission's register, which says both trees were likely raised in the Central Experimental Farm nursery around 1897 and planted here in or around 1900. Roughly 125 years, then, with the register's own likely and its in-or-around left in place, because no second document names either tree.
What that decade explains is why they are here at all. Ottawa spent the years around 1900 deliberately rebuilding its own appearance, and ornamental stock from the government farm was the cheapest way to do it. Major's Hill Park sits on the bluff above the canal locks with Parliament Hill directly opposite, which made it the first place the effort showed. Stand between the two limes and you are standing in the result.
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4
The Yellow-wood of Major's Hill Park
American Yellowwood (Cladrastis kentukea) · not documented · ByWard Market / Major's Hill
The wild range of this species is a scatter of hillsides in Kentucky, Tennessee and the western Carolinas, and even there it is one of the rarest native trees in eastern North America. This one grows well over a thousand kilometres north of all of it, on the edge of a downtown park in Ottawa.
American yellowwood, Cladrastis kentukea, which older labels and the capital's own register still call Cladrastis lutea. The name is literal. The heartwood is bright yellow and was once boiled down for dye. The bark is smooth and pale grey, closer to a beech than to anything else growing near it, and the tree forks low and spreads wide, so it is one to walk under rather than past. Every few years, and pointedly not every year, it hangs the whole crown with drooping chains of white flowers that smell like wisteria, which is the family it belongs to. In the years it skips, it just makes leaves.
It shares this end of Major's Hill Park with the two vine-leaved limes, and unlike them it arrived without paperwork. The register names the tree and gives no planting date, and nothing else we can find mentions this specimen at all. Somebody in the parks service probably knows the year. If that is you, we would like it.
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5
The Serbian Spruce Trio
Serbian Spruce (Picea omorika) · not documented · Downtown / Elgin Street
In the wild, Serbian spruce survives in one place on earth: a handful of limestone gorges along the Drina, in the mountains between Serbia and Bosnia, where it hangs on as a leftover from a colder world. Three of them stand together in Confederation Park, close enough that they read as one tree with three trunks, a short walk from the city's South African War Memorial.
They are easy to pick out once you know what to look for. A Serbian spruce is absurdly narrow for its height, a spire rather than a cone, with short branches that sweep down and then turn up at the tips. The needles are flat, dark green on top and marked underneath with two chalk-white bands, so on a windy day the whole group flickers between green and silver. That narrow build is also why the species is planted here at all: it sheds the better part of two metres of snow a winter without losing its limbs.
Confederation Park itself opened in 1967, laid out for Canada's centennial on two and a half hectares between Elgin Street and the canal. When the three spruces went in is not recorded anywhere we can find, and the register that lists them gives no date. If you have a photograph of this corner from before they were there, that would settle it.
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6
The Mackenzie King Pear
Ussurian Pear (Pyrus ussuriensis) · not documented · Downtown / Elgin Street
A prime minister used to live where this pear is standing. Until 1923 William Lyon Mackenzie King rented at the Roxborough Apartments on Elgin Street, the grandest block in the city when it opened in 1910, and his diary is openly sentimental about the day he left it for Laurier House. The Roxborough came down in 1966 and Confederation Park was laid out over the site, so the smartest address in Ottawa is now lawn, memorials and one Ussurian pear.
The species comes from the Russian Far East and northern China and is about as cold-hardy as pears get, which is why it is here and why most orchard pears are not. In early May it flowers hard, the whole crown white, ahead of nearly everything else in the park. Whether anything follows is a point the sources argue about: the capital's register says a stand-alone Ussurian pear sets no fruit because it depends on cross-pollination, while growers of the species describe it as at least partly self-fertile, with a second tree improving the crop rather than making it possible. Go for the blossom, and treat any small hard pears in autumn as a bonus.
Its own age is unrecorded. The register names the tree, ties it to King's old address and stops there, which leaves the planting year open. Somebody watched it go in. If that was you, we would like the date.
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7
The Ottawa Improvement Commission Horse Chestnut
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · roughly 125 years · ByWard Market / Major's Hill
The body that planted this tree was called the Ottawa Improvement Commission, and it was handed sixty thousand dollars a year to make a lumber town look like a capital. It was created in 1899 and it is the ancestor of today's National Capital Commission. Its early planting leaned on the Central Experimental Farm across town, whose arboretum had gone from 200 trees in 1889 to 3,000 by 1899 and could supply stock by the wagonload. The capital's tree register puts this horse chestnut in those first years, likely planted circa 1900. Likely and circa are the register's own words and they stay: no second source names this particular tree. Call it roughly 125 years old and treat the year as approximate.
It is not a chestnut and it is not from anywhere near here. Aesculus hippocastanum grows wild in a few mountain valleys in the Balkans and was carried across Europe and then North America purely as an avenue tree, for the reason that shows in late May, when the crown fills with upright white flower spikes standing on the branches like candles. The nuts that drop in September are the ones children fight with and nothing eats.
It stands at the Sussex Drive end of the Major's Hill Park slope, a few minutes uphill from the two vine-leaved limes.
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8
The Tulip Season Willow
Crack Willow (Salix fragilis) · not documented · ByWard Market / Major's Hill
The crack willow is named for the noise, and the noise is the strategy. Its twigs snap off cleanly at the base in wind, float away down the water and root wherever they wash up, which is how one willow turns into a riverbank full of them. This one grows below Major's Hill Park on the slope toward the Ottawa River, with the National Gallery of Canada on one side and the twin spires of Notre-Dame Cathedral Basilica on the other. There are few better places in the city to stand under a tree.
Mid-May is when the ground around it is worth the walk on its own account. The park is planted out for the Canadian Tulip Festival, which began with a gift of bulbs from the Dutch royal family after the Second World War, and the beds run right up to the willow while the crowds work their way along them. The tree's own contribution to spring is a couple of weeks of small green catkins in April that nobody has ever crossed town for.
Willows grow fast, hollow early and are almost always younger than they look, which makes guessing at this one pointless. The register names it and records no age, no girth and no planting date. If anyone has put a tape around it, we would take the number.
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