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.