The Amur Cork Tree of Square Michel-Foucault

Paris classifies this Amur cork tree as one of its remarkable trees, and it carries proof of a rough century outdoors: a lightning scar runs down the trunk. It shares its small pocket garden, opposite the Collège de France in the Latin Quarter, with the two Oriental planes already listed here, though almost nobody looks past those two to notice it. Phellodendron amurense is a startling find in a French square, native to the river valleys of northeastern China and the Russian Far East, grown there and studied for a thick, corky, deeply furrowed bark long before anyone planted it for how it looks. This one went into the ground in 1925, and the city's own record has it at 14 metres tall with a trunk 1.8 metres round as of 2011, a girth built less by height than by branching low and wide, so the trunk balls up beneath the crown instead of running straight. Compound leaves shaped like an ash tree's turn a hard yellow every autumn. The measurement is now fifteen years old and the tree has kept growing since, and this pass found only the city's own account of it, so the numbers are given as recorded rather than confirmed twice over. Still worth the two extra steps past the planes: not every French square holds a tree from the Amur river valley with a lightning strike already behind it.