The Garden Trees of Jardin des Chartreux

This garden sits on the steep slope between the Croix-Rousse plateau and the Saône, on ground once attached to a Carthusian monastery that gave the neighbourhood its name and that disappeared, like most French religious houses of its kind, during the Revolution. What remains today is a public garden of broad lawns and mature trees, magnolia, cedar and horse chestnut among the species named in descriptions of the site, arranged to take advantage of a genuinely striking view over the Saône quays and the hills of Fourvière on the opposite bank. No individual tree here has a documented planting date or measurement, and no single specimen is singled out by name the way the labelled trees elsewhere on this list are, so this entry describes the garden's mature tree cover as a group rather than claiming one named champion. The steep terrain that makes the view worthwhile also keeps the garden genuinely quiet, a local rather than a tourist destination, reached by a climb up from the river that most visitors to Lyon never make.