The Grange Cedar

This cedar is a direct descendant of the Beaulieu cedars across town, grown from their seed once the Lullin family decided their own lakeside estate needed the same fashionable tree everyone else was planting. Cedars of Lebanon became the must-have addition to Geneva's English-style landscaped parks from around 1800 onward, and the Grange estate, later the city's largest park, got its own sometime in that same window, though no source pins the planting to an exact year. Two centuries on, the tree has outgrown its parent generation: 7.62 metres around the trunk and just over 25 metres tall by a 2019 measurement, a girth that would take four or five adults joining hands to encircle. Parc La Grange has a literary footnote worth knowing: Franz Liszt and Marie d'Agoult stayed at the estate in the 1830s, and their daughter Cosima, later Richard Wagner's wife, was born nearby during that same visit. The cedar would already have been a substantial young tree by then, decades into growing toward the giant it is now. It stands near the park's main house, an easy stop on a walk through Geneva's rose garden and lakeside paths.