The Ash of Butte du Chapeau Rouge

An ash with a trunk four metres round is getting harder to find in Europe. Ash dieback, a fungal disease, has been working through the continent's ash trees since the 1990s, and a big one still standing is worth noticing. This is one of the trees the city of Paris lists as remarkable, 405 centimetres round and 21 metres tall, on a hillside park in the far north-east of the city. The Butte du Chapeau Rouge opened in 1939 on ground that had belonged to the Thiers fortifications, the ring of walls and military land that once enclosed Paris. Whether the ash was already growing when the park was made, or went in with it, nobody has written down. The register leaves its planting year blank, and so do we. The city still counts it among the park's best trees. On a 2023 botanical walk its guides listed the ash alongside the purple beeches, Japanese pagoda trees, tulip trees and yews, and the park page adds a paper mulberry, a Siberian elm, a giant sequoia and several honey locusts. Nobody has reported on the state of its crown lately. If you walk past, look up, and tell us how it is doing and roughly how old you think it is.