The Caucasian Wingnut of Square Louise Michel

There are two Caucasian wingnuts in this square and only one of them has a birthday. The register lists both, sixty metres apart, at 371 and 416 centimetres round. The published account of the garden describes a wingnut of 3.60 metres planted in 1899, which fits the smaller of the two closely and the larger one not at all, so the date sits here, on this tree, and the bigger one keeps no age rather than borrow one. The heights do not line up as neatly. That same account gives its wingnut 20 metres; the register now measures this one at 26. Years of growth would explain the gap, and so would the account having described the other tree all along, and nothing available settles it. What is not in dispute is what happens in high summer. Chains of pale green winged seeds hang straight down from the branch tips, long, narrow and unlike anything else growing on this hillside, and on a crown this size there are hundreds of them at once. Come in February and you would walk past it without a second look. It went into the ground in 1899, the year before the funicular started hauling visitors up the slope beside it, and it has spent every summer since dangling seed chains over people too busy climbing to look sideways.