The Farrell Planetree

The house this tree was planted to shade is now a parking lot. The plane tree has outlived it by more than a century. An 1880 photograph shows it as a thin sapling beside the home of Sylvester Farrell, a feed-and-grocery merchant who moved into salmon canning and later sat on Portland's City Council. The tree was reportedly a gift from US Senator J.N. Dolph. Farrell's house is long gone, the corner it stood on has been given over to parked cars, and the plane tree carries on in the planting strip beside them. Portland made it a Historic Landmark in 1973 and entered it on the new Heritage Tree register the same year as number 2, which makes it one of the first trees the city ever formally protected. It is about 19.2 metres tall with a trunk 4.36 metres around. Locally it gets called a sycamore, which it is not. Portland's old nickname was Stumptown, earned honestly: the city cleared its native forest fast and left the stumps standing in the streets. This tree belongs to the second chapter, planted on purpose by people who had watched the first forest go. It has now outlasted the man who planted it, the house he planted it for, and the neighbourhood they were both part of.