The Caucasian Wingnut of Square des Batignolles

Run your eye down this trunk and it looks ploughed. The city's fact sheet describes the bark of this Caucasian wingnut as very rough and deeply ridged, on a trunk that is fluted rather than round, carrying a crown 30 metres up. The species comes from the damp lowland forests between the Caucasus and northern Iran, a long way from a square in the 17th arrondissement. This one went in in 1899, by the city sheet's date, which makes it a late arrival in a square laid out in 1862 and 1863. It has been growing here through every year of the twentieth century. The open register leaves the planting year blank, so the sheet is the only witness to its age. Its trunk has kept growing since the sheet was written, or someone measured it differently. The sheet gives 395 centimetres round; the register now has 435. Nobody has recorded when each figure was taken, so we give both. The time to come is high summer. From July into September the branches hang with long green chains of winged nutlets, each one a string of small seeds with a wing on either side, and a crown this size carries a great many of them. A small lotus persimmon, also on the register, stands almost at its foot. The square's great plane is 68 metres away, so the two make one visit.