Seven and a half metres round, and only eighteen metres tall. Trees that thick are usually far higher than that, and this one is not: it has spent two and a half centuries going outward rather than up, which is what a cedar of Lebanon does once it stops racing. The leading shoot flattens off, the limbs run horizontal, and the crown assembles itself in tiers, one dark green table stacked above another. The City of Lausanne's heritage-tree register and Lausanne Tourisme give the same figures: roughly 250 years, 18 metres of height, 7.40 metres of girth. A germination in the 1770s means the tree is older than the Canton of Vaud itself, which only came into being in 1803. Lightning hit it in 2003 and took out one of the branches. It carried on. Both sources record it in good health since, with its trunk still expected to thicken, which is not something you can say about every 250-year-old tree on a city register. The cedars this species descends from grow on mountains in Lebanon and Syria, where the old ones are scattered survivors of forests logged since antiquity. Parc de Denantou is free, open and flat, and a short walk from the lakefront promenade.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Parc de Denantou, lakeside, Lausanne
You can recognise it by its proportions, a trunk 7.4 metres round under a crown only 18 metres high, the limbs built outward in flat horizontal tiers. It stands in the lakeside Parc de Denantou.
Central Lausanne/Ouchy area, walkable from the lakefront promenade.
In fruit
September to November: upright barrel cones that sit on the branches like eggs
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
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.