The Silver Poplars of Freiligrathpark

Two white poplars in a small Floridsdorf park were planted a year apart, in 1899 and 1900, and both are now well over four metres round. The city's tree cadastre records the first at 4.43 metres and the second at 4.15, and either figure is a very heavy trunk for a white poplar. Vienna lists both in its natural monument register, as two separate entries about 55 metres apart in the Freiligrathpark. We have folded them into one stop, because you will want to see them together and the walk between them takes under a minute. Both fall in the cadastre's 16 to 20 metre height class. The planting years are the cadastre's own records for these two individual trees, which puts them at about 125 years old. That is about all the paperwork says. Neither tree appears in the German Wikipedia list of Vienna's monuments with a matching address, and there is no published description of why they were protected. The most recent photograph we have found dates from 2016, though the cadastre that carries them is the city's current data. The park is out in the north-east, across the Danube from the old town and on no walk with the other trees on this page. If you go, look for the silvery undersides of the leaves, which is how the species got its name, and tell us how they are doing.