The Cedars of Parc Beaulieu

A French naturalist smuggled cedar seeds out of a garden in England, sowed them at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, and a handful of the resulting saplings ended up gifted to a Genevan baron in 1735. Bernard de Jussieu's seed run is the same one behind the celebrated Cedar of Jussieu still standing in Paris today, a rare case of two cities' oldest cedars sharing one 18th-century courier. Baron Jean-Francois de Sellon planted his share at his lakeside estate, now Parc Beaulieu, and two of the resulting trees still stand there, close enough together to read as one destination rather than two. Geneva's own tree register calls them the oldest cedars of Lebanon in Switzerland, and possibly in Europe, a claim this entry repeats as the city's own rather than an independently verified fact. Lightning has since taken several metres off the tallest, now 27 metres instead of the 30-plus it once reached, and its trunk has grown past 6 metres around, canopy spread 34 metres, numbers that make the loss of a treetop look almost incidental. Napoleon is said to have visited the estate in 1800, back when the cedars were already mature enough to be worth the detour.