The Chinese Wingnut of the Serres d'Auteuil

A city page puts the number of Chinese wingnuts in all of Paris's gardens at about ten, and this is the one the register of remarkable trees picked out. It is listed, in the city's words, for its size, its presence and its rarity in Paris. It is the only tree of its species anywhere on that register. The size is what you notice first. The register measures the trunk at 587 centimetres round on a tree only 20 metres tall, so this is a wide, heavy tree rather than a tall one. The fact sheet gives slightly different figures, 540 centimetres and 26 metres, and the two documents agree on the planting year, 1905. That makes it a near contemporary of the greenhouses that give its garden a name. The Jardin des Serres d'Auteuil was built at the end of the nineteenth century as the city's plant nursery, and its iron and glass houses still stand a few minutes from the Porte d'Auteuil metro. The wingnut has been growing in their garden for 120 years, through two world wars. The Chinese wingnut is the eastern relative of the Caucasian wingnuts found in several Paris squares, and it comes from river valleys in China and Korea. Eighty metres away in the same garden stands a ginkgo planted ten years earlier, another Chinese tree that has done well here, so the two make a short walk.