The Tulip Tree of Parc de l'Impératrice

The château at the top of this lawn is Italy's mission to the United Nations. The lawn is not: Geneva bought the estate in 1983 and kept the grounds public, so the terrace, the long view down it and the tulip tree standing at its head belong to anyone who walks up. The city's own description of the park puts the tulipier de Virginie and a giant sequoia together at the top of that slope, and the tulip tree is the one worth the climb. Five metres and six centimetres round the trunk, a metre and a half through, grown in open ground with nothing crowding it, which is why it has the shape a Liriodendron is supposed to have and rarely gets in a city. The species is North American and takes its name from the greenish orange flowers it opens in June, high in the crown and easy to walk under without noticing. The leaves give it away instead, cut off square at the tip as though someone had trimmed them with scissors. Its age is a girth estimate rather than a date. The register's planting year for this entry is one of the file's placeholders, so the honest reading is somewhere between one and one and a half centuries, on a species that grows fast when it is given room. Geneva's own page calls the park's trees centenarian and leaves it there too.