The Holm Oak of Cimetière des Rois

This oak is nearly twice as wide as it is tall. Twelve metres of height, a crown twenty metres across, a trunk 2.64 metres round, and it sits at the main entrance of the Cimetière des Rois, the plot Geneva keeps for the people it wants to remember. Everyone going in or coming out passes under it. Holm oak is a Mediterranean evergreen and has no obvious business this far north, yet the canton lists two of them as remarkable trees, this one and another in Parc Geisendorf, and the city's arborist rates the pair as equals. Being evergreen it looks the same in February as in July, which at a cemetery gate is closer to a job than a habit. Behind it lies Jorge Luis Borges, who chose Geneva over Buenos Aires for the end and got a headstone carved with Old English, and somewhere behind it lies John Calvin, who asked in 1564 to be buried without a marker and was obeyed so completely that the stone bearing his initials marks a guess at the spot rather than the spot. A cemetery full of certainties about who is there and vagueness about exactly where. The canton's last recorded field visit, in 2012, put the tree in good condition. Its planting is filed only as mid twentieth century, no closer. Which makes this a young tree keeping very old company.