The Serbian Spruce Trio

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.