The Poplar by Gokoku Shrine

Sapporo chose a European street tree for a European-looking town. This poplar stands between the carriageway and the pavement along the edge of Gokoku Shrine, and although it is named after the shrine it belongs to the city, which planted it. It is 5.4 metres round and 27 metres tall, with an Environment Ministry estimate of 100 to 200 years, which would put it among the earliest street planting the colonisation office did. Several more of the same size stand along the same stretch. The choice makes sense in context: the Hoheikan a few hundred metres away in Nakajima Park was built by the same office as a western-style hotel, and a Lombardy poplar is about as western as a tree can look, a narrow green exclamation mark of a thing used all over Europe to line roads. Then the motor car arrived and low branches became an obstruction, so everything reaching toward the road was cut back and the long limbs shortened, and what is left is a tree with a strange, pruned outline. It looks perfectly healthy on it. Lombardy poplars are all male clones, propagated from cuttings since the eighteenth century, so this tree has no seedlings anywhere.