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.

An unprepossessing opening picture, true.
It was a glorious bright-sunny day, so the interior seems dark dark dark. These are the pair of South-facing windows in our dining room; they're unusually large for an 18th C. house. With such low sills my guess is that they're a 19th C. addition. Whatever: They are a pleasure welcoming the Winter sun as well as the Summer view. I planted all kinds of plants to make that view worthwhile. Here's the show out the lower-left sash.
Boy do I love these plants. We'll look at most of them, and soon. Right now, the gold-leaved Japanese maple.
Yup, that's the color, and all season long: Glowing gold but not over the line into "Jeez, honey, where are my sunglasses?" yellow.

It's a Japanese maple too, mind you, so has that tribe's multi-trunked classy look to the branches and trunks. So yes, it's good even in Winter, when (alas, sniff, sigh) the leaves have fallen. But if we're lucky (I haven't been so far, but I live in faith), the Fall weather is such that just the tips of the leaves turn a cherry Fall red, leaving a round interior of each leaf still gold—hence the "Full Moon" of the common name. The tree is very slow growing, so buy the biggest you can afford. After a couple of decades, it might be only 18 feet tall. It's happy in amazing amounts of shade too; conversely, it handles full sun without scorching only if the soil is rich and it doesn't have to beg for water. I never water mine even though it's on the South side of the house and gets full West sun. So I guess my soil passes the test on both counts.
More on the companion plants later—and soon.