The Caucasian Wingnut of Square d'Estienne d'Orves

Come up the steps from the Trinite metro and it is right there, twenty-six metres of it, reported to be the oldest living Caucasian wingnut in France. Two independent sources give a planting date of 1862 and a trunk 3.8 metres around, and they match the city register to the centimetre, which is rarer than it should be. The claim about being the oldest in the country belongs to those sources rather than to us: no ring count has been published, and a tree dated 1862 makes it plausible without proving it. Pterocarya fraxinifolia comes from the Caucasus and northern Iran, a wetland species happy in ground too wet for most hardwoods. It gives itself away in high summer, when chains of winged green nutlets up to half a metre long hang from the branch tips, and its ash-like compound leaves can run to sixty centimetres. Left alone the species suckers from the root plate until one tree becomes a thicket of itself, which is what makes a clean single trunk of this size worth the stop. Paris gave it the Remarkable Tree label on 1 April 2017. It stands in the small square in front of the church of La Trinite, in a quarter rebuilt during Haussmann's works, so the tree and the streets around it went up together and it has been growing beside the station entrance since before the Metro existed.