The Pecan of the Jardin Public

The tallest tree in Bordeaux's Jardin Public is an American nut tree. At 38 metres the pecan stands above everything else in the garden, and that figure is one of the rare cases where the city's register and the city's own magazine give exactly the same number instead of two measurements taken a decade apart. Pecan belongs to the river bottoms of Texas, Louisiana and the Mississippi valley, where it needs long hot summers to fill its nuts. Bordeaux, warm and Atlantic, is about as far as the species gets in a European public garden without ending up in an orchard. It is one of the seven Bordeaux trees carrying the A.R.B.R.E.S. label of 2012, which is a national association's judgement rather than a municipal one. The trunk figures wobble slightly between sources, 421 centimetres around in the register against a range of 358 to 420 on the city page, which is the ordinary drift of one tree measured twice by different people. No age has ever been published. The Jardin Public was laid out in the 1740s as a promenade for a city grown rich on wine and colonial trade, then rebuilt as an English-style park a century later. The pecan is at most as old as that second version of the garden and probably younger. It stands on the central lawn, a few paces from the ginkgo.