The Wingnut of the Ranelagh Garden

This Paris garden carries the name of a London one. In the eighteenth century a ballroom here borrowed it from Ranelagh Gardens, a fashionable pleasure ground on the Thames, and the Jardin du Ranelagh has kept the word ever since. The wingnut came much later, in 1920, by the date on the city's fact sheet, two years after the First World War ended. It is a Caucasian wingnut, a fast, big tree from the wet lowlands between the Caucasus and Iran, and the register measures it at 465 centimetres round and 28 metres tall; the sheet gives 449 and 28. For a tree barely a century old, that is a lot of trunk. The open register leaves its planting year blank, so the 1920 rests on the printed sheet alone. We have to be straight about one thing. We have found no recent photograph or report of this particular tree, and the pin sits on the register's point rather than on a trunk anyone has confirmed. The city still lists it, and that is all we can say for certain. If you walk through the garden, look for a wingnut with a trunk over four and a half metres round, and tell us whether it is still there. A photograph would settle it. In summer, a healthy wingnut is hard to miss, its branches hanging with long green chains of winged seeds. The garden is a few minutes from La Muette metro and free to enter.