The Anne Frank Chestnut

This chestnut is not old. It is barely twelve, planted at the centre of Place Marc-Aron in December 2014 to replace a statue called Renaissance that the square's renovation had removed. What makes it worth a stop is where it comes from: it is a cutting from the horse chestnut Anne Frank could see through the attic window of her hiding place in Amsterdam, the tree she described in her diary as one of the only things connecting her to the outside world. That original tree fell in a storm on 23 August 2010. Before it went, the Anne Frank Foundation had already taken roughly 150 cuttings and sent saplings to institutions and public spaces worldwide, Washington DC, Jerusalem and Paris among them, so the tree from the diary kept growing in dozens of places after the original one did not. Lyon's arrived on rue Moncey in a public ceremony and now stands in a small square two minutes' walk from Place Guichard metro station, marked by nothing more than its own planting. It will not be Lyon's oldest or largest tree for a very long time, maybe not ever. It is here because of what it descends from rather than what it has personally witnessed, the one entry on this list whose whole story predates its own roots.