The Stone Pine of Parc des Eaux-Vives

A Mediterranean umbrella pine has no obvious business on Lake Geneva, and this one is thriving. Pinus pinea is the tree of the Roman roadside and the Italian coast, a bare trunk running up to a flat parasol of a crown, and the silhouette reads as out of place among the cedars and planes of the Eaux-Vives parks. It stands 19 metres tall with a crown 17 metres across and a trunk 280 centimetres round, and the cantonal register rates its vitality as excellent. The species is the source of pine nuts, which take three years to ripen inside cones heavy enough to be worth watching out for underneath. Whether this tree bothers producing them this far north is a fair question, and not one the register answers. Nobody has dated it. The planting field for this entry is empty, not even carrying the placeholder January date that fills so much of the file, and no growth figure for stone pines in this climate turned up that would support an honest estimate. So the age here is blank rather than guessed. If you know when it went in, or know somebody at the parks department who does, tell us and it goes on the page. It stands about 65 metres from the bald cypress, which makes the two of them a single short detour off the lakeside path.