The Improvement Commission Sycamore

The register that lists this tree files it under Northern eccentric, which is a polite way of saying it should not really be here. American sycamore is a tree of the eastern and central United States and reaches Canada only in the far south of Ontario. This one is growing beside the Rideau Canal, several hundred kilometres north of where its species gives up. It arrived by programme. Between 1899 and 1904 the Ottawa Improvement Commission planted 14,000 trees and shrubs along what is now Queen Elizabeth Driveway, with another 11,000 waiting in the nursery, the work done by staff from the Central Experimental Farm. The National Capital Commission's remarkable trees register ties this sycamore to that campaign, which puts it at roughly 125 years old. Nobody has published a girth or an independent dating, so the age comes from the register's account of the planting rather than from the tree itself. The register also records an Indigenous name for it: Chikimeminij. Sycamore is easy once you know the bark. The outer layer sheds in plates and leaves the trunk mottled cream, olive and grey, palest on the upper limbs, which is why a sycamore in winter reads almost white from the far bank. The roadway closes to cars at weekends, so you can stand in the middle of the lane and look up without anybody minding.