The Weeping Cedar of the Vallée-aux-Loups (Cèdre pleureur)

Every blue weeping Atlas cedar in the world came off this one tree. The cultivar Cedrus atlantica 'Glauca Pendula' appeared here as a mutation around 1873, and every specimen since has been a cutting or a graft descended from it. If you have seen one draped over a lawn in a park or a garden somewhere, you have seen a copy of this. It is about 150 years old, roughly five metres round and only 14 metres tall, and it spreads its branches across about 700 square metres, near enough a tennis court. The department calls it the largest of its kind anywhere, which more or less follows from being the first. Weeping branches that long cannot hold themselves up. In 2011 the artist Francis Ballu made around thirty resin supports shaped like stalagmites and set them under the limbs, so the thing holding the tree together looks like a cave floor and visitors can still walk in underneath the canopy. Who raised the original mutation is not quite settled. The department and Wikipedia credit the nurseryman Gustave Croux; some garden histories point instead to the Paillet nurseries in the same corner of Châtenay-Malabry. Both were in the business here in the same decades, and nobody has untangled it. It won France's national tree prize in 2015. The arboretum is free, and the T10 tram stops at Vallée aux Loups.