The Märzpark Lombardy Poplar

Almost every Lombardy poplar you have ever seen is male. The columnar tree spread across Europe from cuttings, and female trees of it are rare, so rare in German-speaking countries that when Vienna found four old ones together in the Märzpark it protected the group in 1938 as Natural Monument 97. The trunks were 1.50 to 2.10 metres round then. What stands there now is less certain, and we would rather say so. The register still keeps one point for the group. The city's tree cadastre records a Lombardy poplar three metres from that point, 3.46 metres round and in the 26 to 30 metre height class, with a planting year of 1911, which would make it well over a century old if the cadastre's year is right. That is a lot of growth since 1938, though plausible for a poplar, and we have not reconciled the two. Whether the other three of the four still stand, we have not been able to check. That matters because Lombardy poplars are short-lived trees, and a group that has made it from 1938 into the present would be remarkable in itself. It is also why our pin marks the park rather than a trunk. Look for the tallest, narrowest trees in the Märzpark by the Vogelweidplatz; the one in the cadastre reaches somewhere near thirty metres. If you go, count them, and tell us how many of the four are left.