The Mount Tabor Sequoia

Forty two metres, on a trunk 7.8 metres round, standing beside a reservoir on the side of an extinct volcano. Mount Tabor is one of the few cinder cones inside an American city, and the water bureau built open reservoirs into its slope in the 1890s with the kind of civic architecture usually reserved for banks: balustrades, gatehouses, iron railings. Somebody planted a giant sequoia next to one of them. It is a Sierra Nevada tree, six hundred kilometres south and two thousand metres up, and it has done better here than most things do at home, because Portland gives it what California increasingly cannot, which is water. The city added it to the heritage register in 1997. What it does not record, because the register has no such field, is when it went in. The reservoir dates the site rather than the tree, and joining those two facts would be a guess dressed as a date. Go to the west side of the park and look for the rectangular reservoir. The tree is on its east bank and there is no mistaking which one it is.