The Ash of Wiktorska

The disease now killing Europe's ash trees was first noticed in Poland, in the early 1990s, and has been working through the country's ash ever since. Warsaw made this one a protected natural monument in June 2020, thirty years into that, which is the context a trunk 368 centimetres round deserves. It is a big ash by any standard: a diameter of 117 centimetres, and the register's girth and diameter figures agree with each other to about a millimetre, which is what a real measurement looks like. It carries its 20 metres in the courtyard of Osiedle WSM Mokotow, the interwar cooperative estate on ul. Wiktorska, 19 metres from a horse chestnut protected on the same day. Two monuments, one yard, two species, measured separately. We have put no age on it. Published growth rates for open-grown Fraxinus excelsior scatter badly, and at this thickness any single figure would be either flattery or an insult, so the field stays empty and the girth sits on file until there is a better way to read it. The courtyard reads as shared, open ground rather than a gated development, which is how these estates were laid out, but nothing we found says so in as many words. If you know the yard, or know how old the ash is, tell us.