The Oak of the Olympic Museum

The building moved instead of the tree. When the Olympic Museum was going up on the Ouchy lakefront, the plan called for felling this oak, and Juan Antonio Samaranch, then president of the International Olympic Committee, intervened personally and had the architects redraw the design around it. The City of Lausanne's heritage-tree register and Lausanne Tourisme agree on the rest: a pedunculate oak of about two centuries, 29 metres tall, the trunk 4.62 metres round. That puts its germination somewhere in the 1820s, so it was already a mature tree when the first modern Games were held in 1896, and it had stood here for well over a century before anybody thought of putting the Olympic movement's museum on this shore. What it is not is theatrical. Both sources make the same observation, that from any distance the oak reads as part of the park's general greenery and vanishes into it, and that once you have picked it out it becomes the focal point of the place. A pedunculate oak will do that: heavy low limbs, a wide crown, nothing vertical to catch the eye until you are standing underneath. It grows on the north side of the museum, near the entrance to the Tom Cafe. The gardens are free and open; the museum building charges. The M2 metro to Ouchy-Olympique leaves you a few minutes' walk away.