The Caucasian Elm of Parc Bordelais

Bordeaux's register files this tree as the false elm of Siberia, which is wrong on the geography by about three thousand kilometres. Zelkova carpinifolia comes from the Caucasus and northern Iran, and it reached France in the late 18th century after the botanist Andre Michaux saw the species near the Caspian Sea. One tree from that introduction, planted in 1786, still stands in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. This one grows beside the lake in the Parc Bordelais, 371 centimetres around and 23 metres tall. Caucasian elm has a shape unlike anything else in a French park: a short trunk that breaks into a dense sheaf of near-vertical branches, so the whole tree reads as a giant upturned broom. Older Bordeaux specimens were often grafted onto elm rootstock, and on some the join is still visible as a change of bark near the base, worth a look while you are down there. The register records its vigour as weak. That is worth knowing rather than worrying about, because the species shrugs off the Dutch elm disease that erased the real elms from these parks, and it can carry declining branches for decades. No newspaper has ever profiled this particular tree, so the measurements are the city's and the rest is what the species does. The park around it was named a Jardin Remarquable by the culture ministry in 2011.