The Oak Collection of Parc de la Cerisaie

This park takes its name from a cherry orchard that no longer exists, replaced just before the First World War by a very different planting scheme. Landscape architect René-Edouard André, son of the more famous Édouard André whose formal garden style shaped parks across France and beyond, designed Parc de la Cerisaie in 1913 on the Croix-Rousse hillside, centring the roughly 1,200-tree planting on a significant oak collection alongside birches, yews and beeches. That timing puts the park's founding trees at just over a century old today, planted the year before the war that would go on to reshape the neighbourhood and the city around them. No individual tree in the collection carries a separately documented age or measurement, so the range given here describes the park's own founding date rather than any single named specimen, consistent with how this project treats other undated group plantings. What survives is less a single monumental tree than a coherent, deliberately designed early 20th century woodland, unusually intact for a century-old civic planting scheme.