The Caucasian Elm of Square Samuel Paty

Paris lost most of its elms to a fungus, and this one survived by not quite being an elm. Zelkova carpinifolia is a Caucasian cousin of the true elms, native to the mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian, and it is far less susceptible to the Dutch elm disease that emptied streets across Europe. That is the reason a tree of this size still stands in the middle of the Latin Quarter. The city register gives it a girth of 267 centimetres and a height of 20 metres, and gives no age at all. Nor does any other source. The species first reached Paris in 1782, but that is a date about the species, not about this trunk, and nothing documents when this one was planted. It stands in the small square facing the Sorbonne across Place Paul Painleve, with the Musee de Cluny and the Roman baths under it a minute away, on ground students have crossed on their way to lectures for as long as the tree has been there. In 2021 the Paris Council renamed the square for Samuel Paty, the history and geography teacher murdered in 2020. The tree kept its address and lost the old name, which is the sort of thing a long-lived tree tends to do more than once.