The Powell Butte Poplar

Lombardy poplars are the disposable tree of the temperate world. They are planted as fast screens, they grow like weeds, they are usually rotten by fifty and gone by seventy, and nobody protects one. Portland protects this one. The city measured the trunk at 122 inches across, which works out at 9.75 metres around, on a tree thirty five metres tall and only twelve across the crown, which is the columnar habit doing exactly what it is famous for. That girth would be remarkable on an oak. On a Lombardy poplar it is close to absurd, and it is the largest circumference on Portland's entire heritage register. The city added it in 2019, one of the most recent designations on a list that started in 1993, which suggests somebody walked past it and thought the same thing you will. The measurement comes from the register and we have not found a second one, so treat the number as the city's rather than as gospel. It is on the Mountain View Trail in Pleasant Valley, out on the eastern edge of the city.