The Kentucky Coffeetree of Parc Bordelais

The French call this tree chicot, meaning stump, because its winter silhouette is so bare and so sparsely branched that people assume it has died. It has not. The city puts it at more than 130 years old and says it dates from the creation of the Parc Bordelais, which opened in 1888, making it one of the oldest things in a park built to give a fast-growing western suburb somewhere to walk. Kentucky coffeetree is a genuine rarity in France. The genus holds two species in the world, this one and a Chinese cousin, and it survives largely because people planted it. Colonial settlers in North America roasted the seeds as a coffee substitute, which is where the English name comes from and which is not a recipe worth reviving, since the raw seeds and pods are toxic. The timber went into fence posts and railway ties. You will look at this one from a short distance. Cavities in the trunk mean the city has fenced a perimeter around it and prunes it regularly to keep weight off the limbs, and the register lists its vigour as weak, which for a tree of this age under active management describes the care rather than an ending. It measures 292 centimetres around and 14 metres tall, modest next to the park's big planes. The point of this one is that it is here at all.