The Canadian Poplar of the Wilhelminapark

Poplars are not supposed to get this old, which is the entire reason to go and look at this one. Canadian poplar is a hybrid of the European black poplar and the American eastern cottonwood, first raised in France in the eighteenth century and then planted across Europe by the million for the same reason people plant it now: it grows faster than almost anything else, throwing up several feet a year on wet ground. The trade-off is that it is soft-timbered, brittle in storms and generally treated as a crop rather than a monument. A hundred years is a good run. Most are taken out well before that because a limb has come down. This one is somewhere past a century and a half and still standing in the northeast corner of the park, which means it has been through every serious storm since the 1860s without losing enough to condemn it. The sound is the other thing. Poplar leaves are held on flattened stalks that let the blade pivot, so the whole crown rattles in wind that barely moves the trees beside it. On a breezy day you hear this one before you see it.