The Ash of Mickiewicz's Courtyard

Vilnius has protected this ash since 1996 and nobody has recorded a single measurement of it. No height, no girth, no age. The register gives the name and the coordinates and stops there, which is unusual for a tree a city considers worth protecting. It stands in the Adomas Mickevičius Courtyard of the university's central buildings, named for the Romantic poet who studied here. The courtyard's name is not evidence about the tree: no source connects Mickiewicz to this particular ash, and it would be easy and wrong to imply he ever stood under it. What is worth knowing is the species. European ash has had a hard thirty years across the continent as dieback thinned it out of woodland from Poland to Ireland, which makes a mature, protected ash in a city courtyard a better thing to stand under than it was a generation ago. This one has old university walls on four sides and a slot of sky above it, and it has grown up through the slot. How much of the university's history it has actually stood through, nobody can say, because nobody has dated it. If anyone has put a tape around this trunk, we would like the number.