The Saman of Habitation Ceron

In 1902 Mount Pelee erupted and wiped out almost the whole population of Saint-Pierre, a few kilometres down the coast. This tree stood, and it has stood through every hurricane on the record since. It is a saman, zamana in Martinique, and its crown covers something like 5,000 square metres of the valley at Habitation Ceron. Encircling the trunk is said to take about ten people with their arms out; nobody has published the figure in metres. The age is disputed. Arbre de l'Annee, the national competition whose public prize it won in 2016, puts it at around 300 years. A Martinique tourism site calls it the oldest tree on the island at more than 350. Neither has a ring count behind it, so the honest answer is three centuries and change. The leaves do something worth standing under. Saman leaflets fold shut when rain arrives and open again as the weather dries, so the shade moves with the sky. That is the species behaving normally, not a legend attached to this particular tree. It grows on a former 17th-century sugar plantation on the north-west coast, run now as a botanical and heritage park, and it is what most visitors have come for. Entry is paid, roughly 8 euros for adults and 5 for children, open daily from 9:30 to 5. Reckon on an hour by car from Fort-de-France; there is no other way up there.