The American Elm of Grande Allee

The City of Quebec's own heritage record is precise about how Grande Allee got its trees: the municipal authorities widened the avenue at the end of the 1880s and lined it with ormes d'Amerique, American elms. Whether this particular elm descends from that planting is not written down anywhere. It measures 94 centimetres of diameter at breast height in the city's inventory, roughly 2.95 metres round once converted from the diameter Quebec publishes, which is a solid street tree rather than a survivor of unusual size, and the avenue has been replanted more than once in the intervening century. So it stands among the elms of Grande Allee rather than as one of the originals. The avenue itself runs from the old walled town out past the parliament to the Plains of Abraham and is known locally as the Champs-Elysees of Quebec; the city carried out its first heritage-tree inventory of the Grande Allee and Chemin Saint-Louis axis in 2011, which is how a street tree comes to be on a register at all. American elm is the tree that gave North American streets their shape, a trunk that divides low and arches out like a wine glass. Then the fungus arrived.