The Caucasian Wingnut of the Rock Garden

This tree came from Rome in 1922, and one of its limbs now rests on a crutch. The Caucasian wingnut on the Flatbush Avenue side of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, just north of the Rock Garden, has grown heavy enough that the garden props and cables its lower branches to stop them tearing out of the trunk. That trunk is the argument: the Garden calls it nearly nine feet through, the city's Great Trees register measures ten, and the two figures have never been reconciled. It stands about 60 feet tall and close to as wide, with roots surfacing in long ridged patterns that run out from the base across the ground. Pterocarya fraxinifolia comes from the wet forests between the Black Sea and northern Iran and reached European gardens in 1782, which is how an Italian nursery came to have one to send. The name is literal. In midsummer the tree hangs chains of small winged nutlets a foot and a half long from its branch tips, green ropes that stay up, browning, into autumn, and nothing else in the garden does anything like it. A clone of it went in near the Herb Garden in 1978, and the difference in size between the two makes the case for coming to see this one. Entry to the Garden is paid, and the pin sits at the main gate: the tree is a walk away, along the Flatbush Avenue boundary.