The Magnolia of Place Gambetta

When Bordeaux rebuilt its busiest square in 2021, the design added more than fifty new trees around the ones already standing. This magnolia is one of two named individually in the historic centre's conservation plan, the document that decides what may not be touched inside the old city. Local press and the metropole's own consultation platform both describe the square's magnolias as centenaires, a hundred years old and more. That is a description rather than a measurement, so read the age as the neighbourhood's estimate and not a ring count. What has been measured: 358 centimetres of girth and 17 metres of height, large for a southern magnolia and very large for one growing in paving. Magnolia grandiflora comes from the American southeast and reached French gardens in the 18th century, where Bordeaux's mild Atlantic winters suited it immediately. It keeps its leaves all year, thick and glossy with a rust-coloured felt underneath, and it flowers in May and June with cream-white blooms the size of a dinner plate that carry a lemon scent several metres. Place Gambetta has been traffic, then a building site, then a pedestrian square in the space of a decade. It has also been one of the most walked-through points in Bordeaux for far longer than that. The magnolia is the element that simply stood there through all of it.