The Wingnut Above the Funicular

The city's register does not file this tree under a garden but under a slope, the Talus du Funiculaire, the bank the Montmartre funicular climbs. The city's fact sheet dates the tree to 1900, the same year the funicular opened. Whether the two were connected, nobody has written down, so take it as a coincidence of dates and nothing more. It is a Caucasian wingnut, and the register measures it at 416 centimetres round and 26 metres tall; the sheet says 418 and 28. The open register leaves the planting year blank, so the 1900 rests on the sheet alone. It is one of several remarkable trees on this hillside below the Sacre-Coeur, with the oriental plane about 110 metres away and a second wingnut further along. The square's two wingnuts have been hard to tell apart in published accounts; this is the one on the funicular bank. The reason to come is summer. From July into September a wingnut hangs out long chains of pale green winged seeds from every branch tip, and a tree of this size carries them by the hundred. The pin is approximate. If you stop on the way up and can say which tree it is, tell us, and a photograph would fix it for everyone after you.