Autumn colour
This poplar is a leftover from a world's fair.
Lombardy Poplar
Populus nigra 'Italica'
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. We map 8 of them, in 6 cities.
It is also famously short-lived: usually rotten by fifty, gone by seventy, planted by the million and protected almost nowhere. The old ones 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.
Seattle
Lombardy poplars are famous for being narrow, and the city's figure for this one says otherwise: a trunk 81 inches across at chest height, which is about 21 feet round, under a tree recorded at 108...
Amsterdam
This poplar was planted as architecture.
Vienna
Lombardy poplars are not supposed to get old.
Almost every Lombardy poplar you have ever seen is male.
Sapporo
Sapporo chose a European street tree for a European-looking town.
Christchurch
The tallest of these poplars reaches 38 metres, and it was planted on purpose to make Christchurch look like somewhere else.
Portland
Lombardy poplars are the disposable tree of the temperate world.
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