The Himalayan Cedar of Parc de Bourran

At 32 metres, this deodar is the tallest tree the Bordeaux register records in Parc de Bourran, and its crown spreads twenty metres across. The trunk measures 534 centimetres round. Cedrus deodara comes from the western Himalaya, where it is a timber tree of the high valleys, and it arrived in European gardens in the 1830s. Nineteenth-century landscape designers used it exactly as it is used here: one enormous evergreen, placed where its shape can be read from a distance across open ground. The park was laid out by Louis Le Breton on the remains of a wine estate, and its planting is a catalogue of what a wealthy nineteenth-century garden could get hold of, with a giant sequoia, a coast redwood, a dawn redwood and a bald cypress standing within a few hundred metres of this cedar. The register gives no age for it and no planting date exists, so this page does not offer one. What can be said is that the park's design and its exotic conifers belong to the same period, and the deodar is the largest of them. Park and chateau were listed as a monument historique in 1992. The park is free and belongs to Merignac.