The Redwood Twins of Chante-Grillon

Two coast redwoods stand about ten metres apart in a small garden on Bordeaux's right bank, one measuring 393 centimetres around and the other 390. The near-identical size and the spacing say they went into the ground together, almost certainly planted as a deliberate pair. The city's register lists them as two entries even though a visitor sees one thing. Sequoia sempervirens grows on a narrow strip of the Californian and southern Oregon coast where summer fog rolls in off the Pacific and does half the watering. Bordeaux is not that. The species has been planted all over Europe and mostly sulks, so a matched pair reaching this girth in an Atlantic French city is the notable part. No source gives an age for either of them. They stand in Parc Chantegrillon, the same small park that holds Bordeaux's thickest registered tree, a black poplar with a 741 centimetre base. Two of the city's strangest specimens in one municipal garden is not a coincidence: somebody chose this ground for exactly this kind of planting, and the whole site is now classified under the urban plan. Beyond the register, nobody has written about these two individually, so the city's measurements are what exists. Stand between them and look up. The bark gives the species away, soft and fibrous and deep red where the light hits it.