The Old Oak of Rue De Laune

La Presse reported that the oldest tree on the Plains of Abraham is a red oak on Rue De Laune, reigning there for more than 250 years. It did not say which one. Five red oaks are registered along that short stretch of the anneau, the ring road that loops the plain, and this is the largest of them by a wide margin: the city's inventory of potentially remarkable trees gives it 132 centimetres of diameter at breast height against 89 to 110 for the other four. Quebec measures its trees across the trunk rather than around it, so that converts to roughly 4.15 metres of girth. It is the best match for the newspaper's tree, on size rather than on a name, and the identification is an inference rather than a settled fact. If the 250 years hold, it was already standing on 13 September 1759, when Wolfe's men came up the cliff from the river and a battle that ended the French regime in North America was decided in about half an hour on this ground. The park around it is a National Historic Site, free, open dawn to dusk and one of the busiest public parks in Canada, and its trees are actively monitored rather than left alone.