This poplar stands alone in the middle of what is effectively an accidental nature reserve.
Black Poplar
Populus nigra
Europe's native black poplar has been quietly bred out of its own landscape. We map 25 of them, in 18 cities.
Almost every poplar planted along a European road or river for the last two centuries has been a hybrid with an American species, so the wild form is now one of the continent's more threatened natives, and it is fast, soft and short lived on top of that. Very few reach real size. Bordeaux's has the biggest waistline in the city's entire register at 741 centimetres, three trunks fused near the ground. Helena, on a street corner in Hel, is about 220 years old; when her twin fell in a windstorm the town's woodcarvers turned its trunk into a sculpture of fishermen, and since winning Poland's Tree of the Year in 2017 she gets a name-day party every 22 May. Venice's grows alone in a wood that took over a former military firing range on the Certosa.
Venice
Berlin
The black poplar is a native tree in Berlin and a rare one, which is a combination worth pausing on.
Rome
Making a monument of a black poplar is a bet against the species.
Krakow
The first public playground in Europe opened on this ground in 1889, and the poplar on the ul.
Vienna
The city's own tree inventory measures this black poplar at 5.95 metres round, and it stands on a harbour access road.
This black poplar is a protected natural monument, and almost everything else about it is a blank.
Florence
This poplar is named after a trade that has almost vanished from the Arno: the renaioli, the boatmen who dredged sand and gravel from the riverbed by hand for generations, a tradition kept alive to...
Warsaw
The neighbourhood asked for this one.
Photo: Panek (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Dresden
Legend says that when this poplar blooms, a war is about to end.
Salzburg
A whole floodplain wood once ran along this bank of the Salzach.
Pamplona
Somebody cut the top off this poplar, and it grew to 26 metres anyway.
Navarra's register describes this tree in eight words, and then uses the same eight words for a different poplar a kilometre and a half away in Villava: a poplar of large diameter, over a metre thr...
A Lombardy poplar is usually a narrow column, the exclamation mark of the roadside.
One of this poplar's three main limbs is dead, and the bark has come away from parts of the trunk.
Three poplars big enough to be catalogued stand within 250 metres of each other on the Villava riverside, and this is the one the surveyors had nothing particular to say about.
The register gives this tree four words and no numbers: a Lombardy poplar of large diameter.
Nobody wrote down how many trees are here.
Setubal
Two black poplars of twenty-five metres stand beside the Escola Secundaria du Bocage, which is named for Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage, the poet born in this city in 1765.
Bordeaux
No tree in Bordeaux's remarkable-tree register has a bigger waistline than this one: 741 centimetres around, three trunks fused near the ground into something closer to sculpture than timber.
Bratislava
A black poplar this size usually means centuries of growth, but the Grinava Poplar is probably closer to a hundred years old, and it was protected in 2007 for its bulk rather than its age.
Photo: TomphanTK (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Bruges
True wild black poplar has all but disappeared from the Flemish landscape, and what survives of it is mostly old pollards in hedgerows, beside ponds and streams and field edges.
Hel
Autumn colour
Hel's best-loved tree survived a storm that killed its twin, and got a name-day party out of it.
Photo: Tomek Siudak (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Manchester
Britain's most endangered native tree is named after this city, and this is the specimen people come to see.
Matera
Matera's hiking club walks an eleven kilometre loop to stand in front of this tree.
Trento
A black poplar with a trunk of 570 centimetres is a rarer thing than it sounds.
Explore by city: Venice · Berlin · Rome · Krakow · Vienna · Florence · Warsaw · Dresden · Salzburg · Pamplona · Setubal · Bordeaux · Bratislava · Bruges · Manchester · Matera · Trento · every city · or browse all species.