The Black Locust of Parc Bordelais

The register records this black locust as 412 centimetres around and three metres tall. Read that twice. It is thicker than either of the redwoods on the other side of the city and barely taller than a first-floor window, and the two figures agree with each other internally, since the recorded trunk diameter of 131 centimetres matches the girth. That is not a slipped decimal in one field. It is the profile of a tree that has been pollarded hard, or broken by a storm, or cut back to a stump and left to resprout. Which of the three, nobody has written down. No press piece explains it and no photograph has been published that would settle it in a second, so what this entry describes is a shape rather than a canopy: a very wide, very low trunk in the middle of the Parc Bordelais, vigour recorded as weak, still officially listed among Bordeaux's remarkable trees. The species has a long French history. Robinia pseudoacacia arrived from North America in 1601 with Jean Robin, gardener to Henri IV, and the genus carries his name. The tree he planted is still alive in Paris. Black locust also regrows ferociously from cut stumps, which is exactly how a trunk this wide can outlive its own crown. Whatever happened here, the base came through it.