Ebner-Eschenbach-Park takes its name from Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, the Austrian writer whose village stories and epigrams made her one of the most important German-language writers of her era, a...
Austrian Pine
Pinus nigra
Austrian pine, Pinus nigra, is a Mediterranean and Balkan species that nineteenth-century cities across two continents planted for exactly what it does best: shrug off compacted, disturbed ground that would stunt almost anything else. We map 4 of them, in 4 cities.
The oldest here grows in the chateau park of Velke Opatovice in Moravia, about 250 years old, its trunk splitting into five stems just above the ground and one of those into three more, which is why locals call it the six-headed dragon. Montreal's, just inside the gate of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery, took its tolerance sideways instead of up, spreading eighteen metres wide on a trunk barely half as tall. Portland's grows out of a street planter a florist put in before the street existed and has reached 31 metres. Vienna's has been a protected natural monument since 1942 with no age ever recorded.
Vienna
Montreal
This pine is 7.5 metres tall and 18 metres wide.
Portland
This 31-metre pine is growing out of a street planter because a florist put it in the ground before there was a street.
Velke Opatovice
Locally this pine is the six-headed dragon, and the count is literal.
Photo: Staza (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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