The Tulip Tree of Parc de l'Impératrice
roughly 100-150 yearsTulip Tree
Which one is it? At the head of the terrace lawn below the chateau, beside a giant sequoia. The leaves are cut off square at the tip, as though trimmed with scissors.
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.
The button above opens directions in your maps app. Bus toward Chambésy/Pregny, or roughly 25 minutes on foot from the botanical garden
- Species
- Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera)
- Age estimate
- roughly 100-150 years
- Location
- Parc de l'Impératrice, Chemin de l'Impératrice 10 (Chambésy)
- Access
- Free, public park. The city bought the estate in 1983 and the grounds are public; the chateau at the top is private, now Italy's mission to the UN. Geneva publishes no opening hours for the park itself.
- Getting there
- Bus toward Chambésy/Pregny, or roughly 25 minutes on foot from the botanical garden
Trees nearby
Ticking this one off, walks past several more, and your collection growing city by city: that is the Ancient Trees app.
Get the appThis page was researched from a distance. If you know this tree, you know things we do not: the species, the age, the size, whether the photo shows the right tree, or that it is gone. Every field on this page can be corrected.
Correct a detail on this pageSuggest another tree