The Caucasian Wingnut of the Stadtpark

Come in July and this tree is hung with several hundred green ropes. The Caucasian wingnut fruits in chains up to half a metre long, each one a string of little winged nutlets that dangle straight down from the branch tips and stay there, greening, then browning, into autumn. No other tree in the Stadtpark does anything remotely like it, and most people who stop have no idea what they are looking at. Vienna put it under protection on 16 December 1941, in the middle of a war, as Naturdenkmal Nr. 280. The city's tree catalogue dates it to 1921 and gives its trunk as 308 centimetres around under a crown 16 to 18 metres wide. It also lists two more wingnuts of exactly the same age within five metres, which is not an accident of record keeping: this species suckers hard from the root plate, sending up new stems around the parent until one tree slowly becomes a thicket of itself. The old bark helps you find it. Wingnut bark is deeply corded and ridged, closer to a very old ash than to the walnut it is related to, and this one carries its enamel monument plaque half swallowed by ivy about chest height. It stands near the Wien river, two minutes from the ginkgo by the Schubert monument.