The Hackberry of Eglise Saint-Sylve

Toulouse's tree inventory files this one as libre, free grown, and that word is worth more than it looks. A municipal inventory is mostly trees cut to fit something: a pavement width, a facade line, a run of overhead cable. This hackberry has been left alone, so it carries the shape the species makes on its own, a broad rounded dome of dense leaf on a smooth grey trunk that stays smooth for decades. The register also puts it at the mature stage, a step further along than the hackberry on Place Saint-Georges, though still not the oldest category the city uses. That is the entire biography. Toulouse's remarkable tree list is the only source that names it, and the list carries no age, no girth and no measurement of any kind, which is true of nearly every tree on this page. Nobody local appears to have written the tree up at all. It stands at Eglise Saint-Sylve on Rue Calvet, out in the Faubourg Bonnefoy northeast of the centre, on the open ground in front of the church rather than inside an enclosed yard, which is the usual reason a tree in a dense city gets to keep its years: the soil around it was never wanted for anything else. Free, open, and a separate errand rather than a stop on the Jardin des Plantes walk.