The Place du Cirque Plane

The largest plane tree in downtown Geneva grows in the middle of one of its busiest intersections, and the reason it got that big is buried under the pavement. Place du Cirque sits on the former bed of the Arve river, rerouted decades before the tree was planted around 1900, and the water table left behind still runs close enough to the surface for the tree's roots to draw on it freely. The result, after roughly a century and a quarter: 35 metres tall, a trunk 4.25 metres around, one and a half metres in diameter, dimensions that would be remarkable in a forest and are startling in the middle of a traffic circle. Thousands of pedestrians pass directly under its canopy every day without necessarily registering that they are walking beneath one of the biggest trees in the canton, let alone the largest one standing in the city centre itself. The square takes its name from the travelling circuses that once pitched their tents on this stretch of the Plainpalais plain. The tree arrived after most of that history, but has since outlasted every circus that has come and gone since.