The Wych Elm of Grande Allee Ouest

The second European elm on this page stands at the western end of Grande Allee, close to where the avenue runs out into the Plains of Abraham, which makes it the link between the street trees and the park trees on a single walk. The city's inventory records it as Ulmus glabra, the orme des montagnes, at 109 centimetres of diameter at breast height, roughly 3.42 metres round once converted from the diameter Quebec publishes rather than a girth. As with the red oak further east, the city's heritage account of Grande Allee documents the avenue's late-1880s widening and its American elm planting, and its 2011 heritage-tree inventory, without naming this species, so the identification comes from the municipal foresters. No age is recorded for it. Wych elm is the odd one out among elms in that it spreads by seed rather than by suckering from its own roots, which is why it turns up as a planted tree in cities far from where it grows wild, and why a European elm on a Quebec avenue is less strange than it first sounds. Public pavement, no restriction, about twenty minutes on foot from Vieux-Quebec.