The Vitifolia Linden (west of the pair)

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.