The Plane Tree of Fontenay Abbey

A plane tree about forty metres tall stands in the gardens of one of Europe's best-preserved medieval monasteries, and most visitors photograph the cloister instead. The Abbaye de Fontenay's own site gives the planting year as 1780, which makes the tree roughly 245 years old, and that date belongs to this specimen, not borrowed from the garden around it. Fontenay is a Cistercian abbey and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and almost everyone who comes here comes for the stone: the Romanesque church, the cloister, the forge. The Comité des Parcs et Jardins de France lists its gardens separately, among them a handful of centuries-old trees, and at forty metres the plane is the one that makes you look up. It went into the ground nine years before the French Revolution began, and it has grown through everything the abbey has been since. The trunk is said to be around six metres round, though that figure comes from photo captions rather than from the abbey itself, so treat it as a rough guide and not a measurement. Entry to the abbey is paid, and the plane is inside, so this is a tree you see as part of the visit rather than on the way to it. Montbard, the nearest TGV station, is about six kilometres away, and a short taxi ride or the seasonal shuttle covers the rest.