The Cedar of Lebanon of Parc Denantou

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.