The Dunbar Street Beech

Vancouver's heritage register is mostly buildings. It also keeps a category for landscape resources, and one entry on it is a single beech standing on the boulevard outside 1711 Dunbar Street. Two separate arms of the same city have looked at that tree and agree on it. The heritage register calls it a beech and stops there. The street-tree inventory, a survey run for asset management rather than for history, records one European beech at the identical address: 133.4 centimetres of trunk diameter, which is about 4.2 metres round, and 19.8 metres of height. It lists no other tree at the address, so there is no question which one carries the listing. Four metres of girth is well beyond the usual run of urban beech, which spend their lives with their roots under pavement. This one does too, on a quiet residential street in Kitsilano, on public ground, free to walk up to at any hour. Come in late October or November and the whole crown goes copper and russet. What nobody has written down is its age. Neither dataset records a planting date and no independent account of the tree exists, and we would rather leave the field empty than fit a number to the girth without a growth rate we trust for beech on this coast. If you know when Dunbar Street got its beech, tell us.