Forêt de Senonches, an oak and beech state forest in the Perche regional park, waymarks its own venerable trees on an 11.6 kilometre loop between four named road junctions. Two of the stops are oaks that grew stranger with age: a five-stemmed ‘armchair’ with a seat in the hollow between its trunks, and three sessile stems rising from one stool that foresters call the Three Brothers. A sweet chestnut planted by a forester’s family and a ring of giant sequoias, their seed brought from America in 1854, complete a walk built around oaks that ends with neither.
0 / 4 visitados en Senonches
Foto: Le Passant (CC BY-SA 4.0)
1
Chêne Fauteuil
Sessile Oak (Quercus petraea) · over 300 years · Forêt de Senonches
This oak grew its own armchair. Five trunks rise from a single stool, and the hollows between them make a seat, which is how the Chêne Fauteuil got its name. The foresters here call it the King of the Forest. The measurements hold the nickname up. The cluster runs 6.8 metres round at chest height, and the tree was recorded at 285 years old in 1980, which puts its first season somewhere around 1695, in the closing years of Louis XIV. A plaque read on site in 2011 gave roughly 310 years. The two readings agree within a decade, so call it 300 to 340 years old today. It is not ageing quietly. There is dead branchwood in the crown, open holes in the stems, and a marked safety zone on the ground around the base, which visitors are asked to stay outside because pieces come down. You look at this one from a few metres back rather than sitting in the chair. It stands in state forest between three named road junctions, the Rond de Condé, the Rond de Monsieur and the Rond des Ruelles, on the 11.6 kilometre loop the forest signs as its venerable trees. The same walk takes in a three-stemmed oak by the D941, a lone sweet chestnut and a ring of Californian sequoias. Park at the Rond de Monsieur and give it ten to fifteen minutes on forest tracks.
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Foto: Le Passant (CC BY-SA 4.0)
2
Les Trois Frères
Sessile Oak (Quercus petraea) · roughly 340 years · Forêt de Senonches
Officially there is one tree here. It looks like three. Les Trois Frères is a cépée, three sessile oak stems rising from a single stool, and France lists it as a Remarkable Tree on that strength. The figures were taken in 2010: 325 years old, 32 metres tall, 5.5 metres round at chest height, 1.75 metres through. Age that forward and the brothers are coming up on 340, which puts their first season in the 1680s, while the court was still moving into Versailles. The forest around them is roughly three quarters sessile oak and a fifth beech, and these three stems are among the handful of trees in it that the foresters name individually. They are also the cheap one on this walk. Where the five-trunked Chêne Fauteuil sits ten minutes into the trees behind a safety perimeter, the Three Brothers stand at the Rond d'Angoulême, a junction on the edge of the D941, so you can be looking up 32 metres of oak a minute after leaving the car. The waymarked venerable-trees loop through the Forêt de Senonches runs past them and on to the Fauteuil, a ring of giant sequoias at the Rond de Monsieur and a solitary sweet chestnut at the Rond de Condé: 11.6 kilometres, four stops, and this is the one to start with if you only have an hour.
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3
Le Châtaignier du Rond de Condé
Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa) · over a century · Forêt de Senonches
The people who planted this tree lived in a forester's house at the Rond de Condé. The house is gone. Their chestnut is 22.3 metres tall. It is also an outsider here. The Forêt de Senonches runs roughly three quarters sessile oak and a fifth beech, and sweet chestnut barely features: the local forest association, which keeps the map of the forest's remarkable trees, calls this one of very few chestnuts in the whole forest. Its trunk measures 1.13 metres across, about 3.55 metres round. Nobody has dated it. The association's own entry says only that it was probably planted more than a century ago, by the people in that vanished house, and puts no number on it. Its neighbours on this walk both carry ages to the year, so the gap is conspicuous rather than typical. If you know when it went in, tell us. October is when it earns the detour. Sweet chestnut drops spined burrs, they split on the ground, and the tree stands at the picnic area at the Rond de Condé rather than off in the timber, so the harvest lands where people sit. The waymarked venerable-trees loop comes through here, and the five-trunked Chêne Fauteuil is a short walk away at the same junction. Most visitors come for the oaks and find this instead.
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4
Les Séquoias et le Cèdre du Rond de Monsieur
Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) and Atlas or Lebanon Cedar (Cedrus sp.) · roughly 90 to 100 years · Forêt de Senonches
Seven giant sequoias ring a single road junction in a French forest of oak and beech. The local forest association, which keeps the map of the forest's remarkable trees, records that the seed for France's first sequoias was imported from America in 1854, and calls this ring unique in the Forêt de Senonches. One cedar grows tight against a neighbouring sequoia, so close that the association describes the two as a pair. A specialist survey of French sequoias counts eight trunks at the Rond and may well be counting that cedar among them, which is a forgivable error at this size. Sizes vary trunk to trunk. Measured circumferences at chest height run from 2.8 to 5.5 metres, so the 5.59 metres often quoted for this site belongs to one representative tree rather than to all of them. The tallest sequoia comes in at 34.2 metres, the cedar at 29.7. The age is less settled than the origin. The association put them at 90 years in 2024; a visitor writing in 2011 described a circle of sequoias about a century old. Somewhere between 85 and 115 years, then, and the 1854 date belongs to the seed reaching France rather than to the day these particular trees went in. This is also where the walk starts. The Rond de Monsieur is the car park for the whole venerable-trees loop, and there is an interpretive panel on site.
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