The Naville Cedar

A mayor planted this cedar in the summer of 1820 because his son had just been born. Jean-Edouard Naville was mayor of Eaux-Vives, then still a commune in its own right rather than a district of Geneva, and he put the tree into the ground on his Montchoisy estate to mark the arrival of Emile. Two centuries later the boy is long gone and the tree is 722 centimetres round. Where it ended up is the other half of the story. The Route de Frontenex now runs past it, the address is simply opposite number 53, and the ground around it is road and building rather than lawn. Tribune de Genève, surveying the trees that tell Geneva's history, found it holding up well in the middle of all that concrete, and the cantonal register agrees: vitality good, development stage senescent, an old tree still doing its job rather than a failing one. The 1820 date is unusually solid for a tree this age. Registers here often record a planting as the first of January, which is a filing habit rather than a record, but this one is backed by a named man, a named son and a stated season. It is a birthday present that outlived everyone at the party, standing at a kerb on a busy road out of town.