Most people walk past a service tree without knowing what it is, and in Central Europe that is partly because there are so few of them.
Service Tree
Sorbus domestica
The service tree is the rowan's overlooked relative: the same family, but a proper timber tree that grows far larger and far slower, and rare enough north of the Alps that a healthy one gets written up. We map 4 of them, in 4 cities.
The fruit is what people planted it for, miniature apples and pears a couple of centimetres long, hard and mouth-drying until frost turns them soft and brown, and then eaten or fermented. The Slovak one has a medal: about 250 years old at Uzovská Panica, planted to mark where one person's land stopped and the next began, 2.95 metres round, and winner of the national tree of the year vote in 2019. Copenhagen's stands in J.C. Jacobsens Have at 3.18 metres round and 16 metres tall, and the Danish register, which does not deal in compliments, calls it a large and beautiful tree. Geneva's is the youngest by a long way, planted in April 1966 beside the Route de Pregny.
Vienna
Geneva
Sorbus domestica is rare enough in Switzerland that a healthy one beside a road counts as a find.
Copenhagen
The register's surveyors deal in centimetres and growth forms.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Uzovská Panica
In fruit
This tree was planted to mark where one person's land stopped and the next person's began.
Photo: Martin Babarik (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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