The Sequoia Grove of Parc Barton

About thirty giant sequoias grow in one Geneva park because a British diplomat's family fell for a California fashion, and because his daughter later made sure nobody could ever cut them down. Robert Peel, son of the British prime minister and Britain's own representative to Switzerland, bought the Barton estate in 1858, right as giant sequoia seedlings from the American west were becoming the trophy planting for European estate owners with money and an English-style park to fill. He planted a grove instead of a single specimen, and it grew into what the city now calls a cathédrale végétale, a vegetative cathedral, dense enough to change the light underneath it. His daughter, Alexandra Barton Peel, inherited the estate and grew as attached to its trees as her father had been. When she bequeathed the property to the Swiss Confederation in 1935, she attached one condition, that it never be divided and that the trees growing there never be felled. The estate came close to a very different fate: League of Nations planners considered Barton as a site for their new headquarters after 1919, and only Barton Peel's refusal to sell kept the grove intact for what it is today, a public park a short walk from the lakefront.