The Wingnut on the Lower Lake

Most people on this bank of the Lac Inferieur are looking at the water, waiting for the little ferry across to the island restaurant, the Chalet des Iles. Turn round. Close to the landing, on the lake path, stands a Caucasian wingnut planted in 1882, one of the trees the city of Paris lists as remarkable. The Lower Lake is one of the two lakes dug in the Bois de Boulogne under the Second Empire, when Alphand remade the old royal forest as a park, and the wingnut came a generation later. By the register's figures it now stands 28 metres tall with a trunk 418 centimetres round; the city's fact sheet says 27 metres and 407 centimetres. Wingnuts are trees of wet ground, native to riverbanks and marshy lowlands from the Caucasus to Iran, and a lake edge is about as close to home as Paris gets. The time to come is high summer. From July into September the tree hangs with long green chains of seeds, each seed carrying a pair of small wings, so that the branches look strung with green beads. The pin is approximate, placed on the register's point near the ferry landing rather than on a trunk anyone has confirmed. If you spot it, a photograph would help the next visitor. A ginkgo grows on the same bank, worth a look of its own in November.