The Great Cedar of Port-Noir

This cedar's age was worked out by measuring a different cedar. Nobody wrote down when it was planted, the cantonal register's date of 1850 falls on a first of January and is therefore a filing convention rather than a record, and no article or archive found so far names the tree at all. So the estimate borrows from the Naville Cedar on the Route de Frontenex, about a kilometre away: same species, same lake, same climate, and a documented planting in 1820. That tree has put on 722 centimetres of girth in 206 years, roughly three and a half centimetres a year. Apply the rate here, to 743 centimetres, and you get about two centuries, which is why the range on this page runs from 180 to 230 years instead of landing on a date. The tree itself needs no arithmetic to be worth the walk. Forty metres tall, more than seven metres round, in good health, standing at the Port-Noir end of Parc des Eaux-Vives where the park runs out towards the water. A second, slightly smaller cedar stands about fifty metres off through the trees, near enough to see from here and far enough to be a different stop. One register entry, one line of measurements and a growth rate borrowed from a neighbour. A reader with a tape measure, or an archive card with a date on it, would improve on all of it.