The City Hall Oak

Vancouver's heritage register lists this oak the way it lists buildings, and two accounts explain how it got there. They cannot both be right. Nature Vancouver's survey of the City Hall grounds says a small oak was planted in 1936, the year the building opened during the city's golden jubilee, and that it now fully occupies the southwest corner of the lawn. The Vancouver Heritage Foundation's page for the address says something else: that King George presented an oak on a visit in 1945. That version trips over its own date. George VI came to British Columbia once, on the royal tour of May 1939, and he did not travel to Canada again after the war. We have taken the 1936 planting as the likelier of the two, which puts the tree at about ninety, and anyone holding the paperwork that settles it should tell us. The corner, at least, is not in dispute. City Hall went up in the depths of the Depression and opened in 1936 for the city's fiftieth birthday, and the oak has been filling its southwest corner through every argument the building has hosted since. Nobody has put a tape around the trunk. If you do, tell us what it reads.