This poplar was planted as architecture.
Lombardy Poplar
Lombardy poplar is the columnar form of black poplar, propagated only from cuttings of a single line, so every one traces back to the same origin tree and none of them set seed. This page maps every lombardy poplar on the site, 3 so far across 3 cities.
It is also famously short-lived: usually rotten by fifty, gone by seventy, planted by the million and protected almost nowhere. The three mapped here are the exceptions. Amsterdam's stands as a living pilaster in the Rijksmuseum's garden of salvaged doorways, planted within a few decades of the museum's 1885 opening. Seattle's grew up beside the temporary Fine Arts Palace built for the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition and has now outlasted the building it was planted to frame. Portland's, out on the eastern edge of the city, carries the widest trunk on the entire heritage tree register at 9.75 metres round, an absurd measurement for a tree built to be thin.
Amsterdam
Seattle
This poplar is a leftover from a world's fair.
Portland
Lombardy poplars are the disposable tree of the temperate world.
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