The Birch of Szczekocińska

Warsaw declared this birch a protected natural monument on 23 December 1981, ten days after martial law was imposed across Poland. Soldiers were on the streets, the telephone lines were cut, and somebody at the city filed the paperwork to protect a tree. The tree earns it. Betula pendula is a pioneer species, quick up and usually done inside a century, on a trunk that stays slim; a girth of 160 centimetres and a height of 18 metres is a large specimen by the standards of anything that calls itself a birch. That is also why no age appears here. Published growth rates for silver birch run all over the place, and an outlier this size would break the arithmetic in whichever direction you pushed it. It stands near the pedestrian crossing at ul. Szczekocinska 4a in southern Mokotow, which is the whole of the address the register gives. Forty-five years of protection have kept a tree that its own species does not usually allow to get old, on a street corner where nothing else marks it out and no plaque explains why it is there. If you know how old it is, or you remember the birch already standing before 1981, tell us. On this one the register has a date of protection and nothing else, and somebody on that street will know more.