The Wych Elm of the Plains of Abraham

Dutch elm disease took out most of the mature elms of North America. This park still has about 750 of them. La Presse's account of the arboricultural heritage of Parc des Champs-de-Bataille describes an elm population contemporary with the park itself, monitored and treated tree by tree against the fungus that emptied streets across the continent, which is an unusual thing for a public park to still be paying for a century on. The thickest trunk in the public part of Quebec City's tree inventory is one of those elms: 154 centimetres of diameter at breast height, which converts to roughly 4.84 metres of girth, since the city measures across the trunk rather than around it. It is not an American elm. The municipal foresters record it as Ulmus glabra, the orme des montagnes, a European species, and the newspaper piece treats the park's elms as one population without separating the two, so that identification rests on the city's own survey. No source gives it an age, and at this size it hardly matters: it is a mature tree of a species that mostly did not get to be one. It stands near Avenue Ontario, free, dawn to dusk.