The Cedar of Lebanon in Victoria Square

Before the war, you needed a key to stand under this cedar. Victoria Square in Clifton was a residents' garden behind four locked gates, and only keyholders got in. Then its railings were taken away in wartime, the garden was left open to everyone, and it has stayed that way. Bristol City Council now looks after it as a public park. The cedar is the reason to come. Its trunk is 5.95 metres round and its branches run out horizontally for about twenty metres. The Bristol Tree Forum counts it among the few trees left from the square's original planting and estimates its age at 150 years. When that planting happened is less settled. The Clifton and Hotwells Improvement Society dates the square to about 1840, another source to about 1860, and no source ties the cedar to either year, so somewhere between 150 and 190 years is the honest answer. A memoir published by the same society remembers a large stone urn standing beneath the cedar. The urn is gone, and so is much of the old planting. The garden was cleared and replanted in 2015, and the cedar stayed. It keeps old company. A fern-leaved beech nearby, 4.8 metres round, also belongs to the original planting by the Forum's account, and the square holds an old black mulberry growing sideways, an Italian maple and a chimera hornbeam besides. Twenty minutes' walk west of Queen Square, it is where a walk through central Bristol's old trees ends.