The Blenheim Street Oak

Vancouver's heritage register lists a pin oak at 4010 Blenheim Street. Vancouver's street-tree inventory, run by another department for another purpose, records no pin oak at 4010 Blenheim Street at all. What it records is five trees sharing that one civic address: two red oaks, two American elms and a young hackberry. The tree on this page is the larger of the two red oaks, 127 centimetres in diameter, about 4 metres round, and 19.8 metres tall. Four metres of oak is a serious tree on a residential boulevard whichever species it turns out to be, and it is the likeliest candidate for the heritage listing: pin oak and red oak are both lobed red oaks and are confused constantly, in registers as much as in gardens. The other possibility is that the register's pin oak stands on the private frontage of the lot, where the street-tree survey does not go, and that the tree we are pointing you at is its unlisted neighbour. Neither dataset settles it. If you know the block and can say which oak is which, tell us, because you can answer that from the pavement in about ten seconds and we cannot answer it from here at all. No planting date or age is recorded for any of the five trees at the address, so the years this one has been standing there are nobody's number yet.