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.
From people who stood here
No notes yet
Did you visit the tree? Leave a note for the next visitor.
Getting there
Parc Barton, Rue de Lausanne, Pâquis
You are looking for a grove rather than one tree, about thirty giant sequoias standing close enough together to change the light underneath them. They fill Parc Barton, off the Rue de Lausanne.
Walkable from central Geneva, roughly 15 minutes, or local bus
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.
- In the official register: Arbres particuliers (Ville de Genève)
- geneve.ch
- fr.wikipedia.org
- geneve-int.ch