The Founding-Era Bitternut Hickory

Somebody has been looking after this hickory since the 1880s, and wrote down when it went in. The National Capital Commission's register records it as cared for since it was planted sometime between 1886 and 1890, a four-year window where most register entries manage a vague century, and that puts the tree at roughly 136 to 140 years old. The dates almost make a better story than they should. Wikipedia gives 1889 as the founding of the Dominion Arboretum, the oldest in Canada, and that year falls inside the register's planting window. Whether this hickory went into the ground with the Arboretum's first plantings or a season or two before them, nobody has recorded, and neither source claims it. What the register does fix is the setting. The tree stands in the wooded part of the grounds among sugar maple and American beech, so this corner of the Farm reads as forest rather than as a display of specimens. It has held that spot through the whole working life of the Central Experimental Farm, from a research station on the edge of a small capital to one the city grew around. The second source is thin and worth naming as such: an essay on the Arboretum's nut trees lists bitternut hickory among the species grown here and describes no individual tree. No girth has ever been published.