The Giant Sequoia of Parc de Bourran

A Californian giant sequoia with a trunk close to six metres round stands in what used to be a Bordeaux wine estate. The metropolitan register measures it at 597 centimetres and 24 metres tall, which makes it the heaviest trunk on this page after the Chante-Grillon poplar. The ground explains the tree. Parc de Bourran was a vineyard belonging to Bordeaux parliamentary families, and in 1768 it was bought by Francois-Armand de Saige, a wine merchant rich enough to control everything from the grape to the shipment, and mayor of Bordeaux in 1791. In 1775 he had an ice house dug into the limestone here, described at the time as the largest in France, and its vaulted cellars still sit under the lawn. The park you walk through now was laid out later by the landscape architect Louis Le Breton, and the whole thing, park and chateau together, was listed as a monument historique in 1992. Sequoiadendron only reached Europe in the 1850s, so however large this one looks it cannot be older than that, and nobody has published a planting date. The register records its size and says nothing about its age, and neither does this page. The park belongs to the city of Merignac and is free to walk into.