The Lietzensee Wingnut

Berlin has five Caucasian wingnuts on record, and this one is not yet a hundred years old. The planting date on file is 1927, which by the standards of most trees on this map is recent, and it is not why anyone stops here. The shape is. The trunk breaks into several stems close to the ground, so the surveyors who measured it gave up on the usual chest height and put the tape around the base instead: 5.94 metres at ground level, a figure they flagged themselves as flattering, because a fork counts as girth in a way a single trunk never does. What it produces is a tree that reads as a small grove growing out of one root plate. Pterocarya fraxinifolia comes from the Caucasus and northern Iran, where it grows in wet ground along rivers, which is why it has done so well on the edge of a Berlin lake and why it is a rare thing in the drier planting beds of the rest of the city. In midsummer it hangs chains of winged nutlets, half a metre long, off the tips of every branch. Berlin protects it as natural monument 4-25/B. The most recent published photograph of it dates from June 2015 and the register listing has carried it since, so if you find it changed, tell us. The Lietzensee plane stands about 170 metres along the same shore.