The Napoleon Oak

Legend says this oak was planted for Napoleon. Its own wood says it was already here. In 2017 researchers dated its germination to around 1778 using tree-ring and genomic analysis, which makes it roughly 22 years old on 12 May 1800, the day Bonaparte reviewed 40,000 troops at Saint-Sulpice a few kilometres along the lake. The local account, which nobody has withdrawn, is that Etienne-Francois-Louis de Loys, who then owned the Dorigny estate, planted the tree that year to mark the occasion. By that tradition it arrived as a transplanted sapling already two decades old and about 15 centimetres thick, which is not impossible and is not what most people picture when they hear that a tree was planted for Napoleon. The two versions sit side by side and we are leaving them there. Either way it germinated before the French Revolution and it is still growing. French Wikipedia records 35 metres of height and 6.75 metres of circumference; some of the 2017 press coverage rounds those to 30 metres and about 7, and nobody has reconciled the figures. What you cannot miss is the hardware. Roughly 140 metres of support cable now run through the crown to hold the limbs against their own weight. The oak stands on the open campus of the University of Lausanne, which has made it something of an emblem, and the metro puts you within a few minutes' walk.