The chrome-leaved Scotch elm is Number Ten of my favorite twenty plants: see the full line-up here.
I love this plant first and foremost because the hot-yellow leaves stay hot and yellow the entire Summer. No scorching, and (almost) no fading.
And also because the tree is so responsive to pollarding. Late in April, I cut all the branches that had grown up the Summer before...

... down to stubs.

Truly, an inch or less of I get the heavy stubs in the jaws of my loppers.

But did the elm falter, let alone fail? Not a chance: Six weeks later, the new branches are already over a foot long.

And there are several dozen of them too.
This is a tree of singular enthusiasm—or is it stubbornness? I massacre it annually, and it roars back, annually, with I'll-show-you intensity. These new growths will be eight or ten feet long by September, growing a yellow flame of foliage that's as dense as it is compact. (Unpruned, the elm could top eighty feet.) We're a good pair, my elm and me.

Foliage foliage foliage. Flowers are fun, but foliage is where the garden's sustained interest lives. Plus foliage can be fabulous in itself.
Wrede's elm has small bright-yellow leaves on vertical new stems. Perfect for a gray day as well as a sunny one. You can let the elm revel in its inner-elmness, to become a big soft-yellow shade tree. Here's the lovely one at Wave Hill.
Pull up a chair, indeed.
What a warm beauty the tree is.
If you have acres to fill, not just a garden, why not plant a grove of Wrede's? Plant each one thirty feet from any of the others in a loose grid. And then, a hundred feet away, plant a purple-leaved beech. Or (hey, this is why you have all that acreage, right?) plant three purple beeches in a triangle a hundred feet on a side. Make sure the trunk of any beech is no closer than seventy feet to the trunk of any elm: You don't want anyone's elbow into anyone's armpit fifty years down the road.
For the next century and more, your gold & burgundy arboreal show will be famous.
But if you're like me, gardening on "only" ad acre and a half, you can keep the Wrede's shrub-sized indefinitely, pruning back each Spring. The new growth is particularly yellow, as well as vertical.
Here's my youngster, only this Spring old enough and big enough for some training-wheel pruning.

Wow, what foliage!
Not a chestnut, not a sassafras. It's a .... well, what IS it?
Firmiana simplex, a Chinese species very popular as a street-tree in Japan, and naturalized here the South. So it must be plenty calm even when there's heat, pollution, heavy soil, and the occasional lifted dog-leg. I've kept one in a pot for years for Summer display in Rhode Island. Here it was, a star of the shot in a Summer feature in Design New England. Click twice to see the photo full-size.

But here's a firmiana enjoying the cool life, right in the ground, in the East Village: Tompkins Square Park.
The green bark on young branches and even trunks is unique in sort-of-hardy trees.
The good news is that the tree is definitely and firmly Zone 7, which means NYC out to Long Island, plus the Cape and Islands and Southeastern Rhode Island. (Googling, I see it's also happy in the Missouri Botanic Garden. St. Louis is Zone 7? St. Louis is Zone 7! Who knew?)
I'll trial it in future Zone 7 projects. Hooray! But the downside of being Zone 7 is that Southwest Rhode Island isn't in it: The eastern tip of the North and South forks of Long Island keep the Gulf Stream at bay, alas. So my firmiana will stay in a pot, and hunker down, dormant and happy, in the basement all Winter. But a big potted firmiana—in Rhode Island, no less—is it's own statement. (And no, not because I let the tree grow bigger and bigger, with a huger and huger pot.) Why? Let's mozey back to those Japanese street scenes. (Oh I hope I have a picture from our Kyoto trip. I know this weekend!)
The trees are pruned back severely—you'd think that the entire city horticulture department had been taken over by the French.
And the trees were clearly handling the pruning well, too, in addition to all the other hard work of being alive in a hole in a sidewalk.
And so: being alive in a pot of Rhode Island dirt not that much smaller than the soil pocket for an entire street tree? Possible, very possible. And it's the pruning that makes it possible: As it limits the above-ground size of the tree, the below-ground part, the roots, are limited naturally.
It would be a thrill if the pruning also resulted in luxuriantly extra-large foliage, like it does when paulownia trees are pruned. To have these leaves twice and thrice as big as they are already?
That would be a performance indeed.

Plants with new foliage that's flushed purple are, I see, somewhat of a continuing theme for me. Yes there are the usual (but still lovely, still welcome) purple leaves of early-Spring peony clumps. And I've posted on Clematis recta 'Midnight Masquerade'. And I've "Maxed" on Catalpa x erubescens 'Purpurea' here. Wait until you see poliothrysis.
I'm returning to Chinese tulip tree today because of the rain yesterday. The matte finish of the leaves holds the rain, and even causes it to bead. And the dusty-to-dark shades of purple only highlight the light refracting in the beads. What a show!
The acid-lime-green bits at the base of each of the leaf-stems—there's a smoldering cluster of them at the center of the picture; click for the full excitement—are the leaf-bud scales that protected the nascent leaves through the winter. Even after each leaf is fully launched in the new season, the scale hangs on, adding it's electric note.
What a thrilling contrast with the purples of the newest foliage, as are the purple-fading-into greens of the older foliage ("older" being relative in that none of the leaves is more than a few weeks old: it's only May, and the tree didn't start leafing out until well into April). I have a trio of Chinese tulip trees, which I prune informally to maximize their interest in branching out and thereby creating more new purple-passioned foliage. (Plus, the pruning keeps the trees small enough that I can easily keep up the pruning. Even I'm not manic enough to attempt a twenty-foot specimen whose new tips needed to be pinched with a pole pruner.)
As long as everything is reachable from ground-level, or from a short step-ladder, when it comes to Chinese tulip trees, more is SO definitely more.

An enormous paulownia tree in full bloom is an astounding thing. Click on the photo twice to see it in all its huge full-size glory.
And to see the show in action, click the One-Minute Max here. The foot-high flower clusters point skyward, each with a score and more of two-inch lavender trumpets.
When the flowers fall to the ground, they keep their interest. This cardinal was scoping out the scene as long as I was, hopping back and forth, from the fallen flowers to nearby shrubs and then right back to the blossoms.
This bird is a florist of a sort. Who knew?