The Grieving Hackberry of Terre-Cabade

This tree came up between two gravestones and neither of them has moved. The hackberry in Terre-Cabade cemetery has grown to over four metres around the trunk and twenty-six metres tall out of a gap barely wide enough to start in, and the association Arbres et Paysages d'Autan has classified it an arbre exceptionnel for Haute-Garonne. It is the best documented tree on this page by a distance: the city's remarkable tree register and an independent regional survey both name it, which none of the others manage. Nobody has published an age. Four metres of girth on a Celtis australis means a long-established tree rather than a young one, and that is as far as the evidence goes. The association's description adds something worth watching for on a hot afternoon. It says the leaves change their shape through the day to cope with the heat, which in a walled cemetery with very little shade reads as a working adaptation rather than a curiosity. Terre-Cabade opened in the nineteenth century on the hill east of the centre, brick walls and cypresses and a climb to get up to it, and the tree stands in the middle of the graves rather than at the edge of them. Free, open daily from eight until six.