A Neighborhood Giant

One of my favorite local trees is on Warren Street. It is growing out of a yard instead of the sidewalk. Usually, when they do host trees, these little front yards of brownstone row houses have smaller ornamental fruit trees or understory specialists like dogwood that can thrive under the taller sidewalk trees. This one, though, is a sidewalk-dominating behemoth. Many of you have probably seen street signs that have been “eaten” by trees. The trees slowly envelop the metal, growing around it, sometimes taking the object deep into the tree. This one has taken a rather serious chunk of fence on both sides, if not the whole length of it through the heartwood.

The identity of this tree puzzled me. That bark doesn’t look like much else in these parts. In fact, it looks like an elephant’s leg. The leaves are way, way up there, but you can, in season, see that they are pinnately compound. So poking around in the fall led me to the conclusion that it’s that tree that grows in Brooklyn, Ailanthus altissima. Ailanthus generally grows fast and dies young, young in tree-terms being half a century or so. This one is, I hazard to guess based on that enormous bole, an unusually old one.