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.

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.