The Wych Elm by the Grand Rond

A big elm in western Europe is unusual enough to be the story. Dutch elm disease, a fungus carried between trees by bark beetles, killed most of the continent's large elms across the twentieth century in two waves, the second and far worse one from the 1960s onward, and a mature wych elm still standing in a city centre has survived something that removed its species almost everywhere else. This one is on Toulouse's own list of remarkable trees, at the Boulingrin, the local name for the Jardin du Grand Rond, a circular garden about two hundred metres across that the city's main avenues run into. The Boulingrin holds a dozen elms nearby; the register marks only this one as remarkable, so trust the pin over the nearest elm. The register is also all there is. It gives the species and the position and then stops: no age, no measurements, no description, and no other source names this tree at all. So take the species as the reason to go and treat any claim about its size as unmeasured. Wych elm is the elm that does not sucker, which means every one of them grew from a seed rather than from a parent's roots, and the seeds are the thing to look for. They come out in spring before the leaves, flat papery discs in dense clusters, green and then pale, hanging thickly enough to pass for foliage from a distance.