The Parkrose Beech

Seven metres round and twenty six metres tall, at the end of a residential street in Parkrose Heights, on a strip of unimproved public right of way that never became road. That detail is the whole story. A beech of this size in a European park would have a fence around it and a plaque. This one survives because the city ran out of street before it ran out of block, so the tree kept the ground it was standing on and the tarmac stopped short. European beech holds its dead leaves through winter when young and drops them cleanly once mature, and at this size the trunk is the thing worth looking at: smooth grey bark stretched tight, with the surface rippling where the buttress roots begin. Beech bark does not crack with age the way oak does, so an old one looks like something poured rather than grown. Portland designated it in 1994, the first year of the register. It has no recorded age, because the register does not have that field.