The Broken-Limbed Poplar of Villava

One of this poplar's three main limbs is dead, and the bark has come away from parts of the trunk. Navarra's surveyors catalogued it as a singular tree anyway, and wrote the damage into the record rather than around it: a poplar of large diameter, three main branches, one of them dead, partially debarked. That description is worth more than a tidier one would be. Of the three big poplars on this stretch of the Villava riverside it is the only one you can identify from the path without counting your steps, because the others are recorded as nothing more than large and vigorous. A three-limbed crown with one bare limb in it, and pale wood showing through where the bark has gone, is a silhouette rather than a category. The register gives the trunk as over a metre across without finishing the measurement, which puts it over three metres round at the very least and probably a good deal more. It stands on the public path along the Arga through Villava, free and open, flat walking from Pamplona. The survey behind all of this dates from 2013 and no other source describes the tree, so the dead limb and the bare patches are thirteen years old as facts. Nobody has recorded an age either. If you walk out and see how it is doing now, tell us.