The Comox Street Wingnut

Vancouver's street tree inventory has 43 wingnuts on its books, and this one, on a residential corner in the West End, is the largest Caucasian wingnut among them. The city measured the trunk at 116.8 centimetres across, which is about 367 centimetres around, under a crown 13.7 metres up. The runner-up, out on Yew Street, is five centimetres narrower. Pterocarya fraxinifolia is a walnut relative from the Caucasus and the forests along the Caspian in northern Iran, and it has one unmistakable trick. Through July and August it hangs chains of winged nutlets from the branch tips, green strings half a metre long, and on a street tree like this one they hang low enough to take in a hand. Out of season, look for the deeply furrowed trunk and the long compound leaves; from a distance a wingnut is easy to walk past as a big ash. The Heritage Vancouver Society put it in a 2006 newsletter round-up of the city's heritage trees worth the walk, with its own photograph. Nobody has dated it. The trunk points to a century or more, but this genus puts on girth quickly, so a thick wingnut is not automatically an old one and the number should be held loosely. If the century is right, it kept this corner while the West End around it went from houses to apartment towers.