The Gray Poplar of Doctors' Garden

Doctors' Garden started life in 1896 as one of Sofia's first botanical gardens, a role it kept for roughly four decades before the collection was absorbed elsewhere and the grounds became an ordinary public park. Its oldest tree predates even that botanical mission: a grey poplar planted in 1892, four years before the garden's formal opening, making it the first tree in the ground on a site that would later fill with imported rarities like ginkgo, bald cypress and thorny honey locust brought over from North America. Populus canescens is a wild-type species, unlike the ornamental poplar cultivars usually chosen for city planting, and its survival as a deliberately kept specimen among later collections of showier imports is itself part of what earned it protected status. The garden takes its name from the doctors of the nearby Alexandrovska Hospital, who used the grounds for open air recovery and, informally, still do, so this poplar has spent more than a century sheltering patients on the same soil where it was one of the first things anyone thought to plant.