The Pedunculate Oak of Rue Viret

Villeurbanne's official tree register calls this pedunculate oak rare, and it means it plainly: street plantings here run to plane and lime, so a full-grown Quercus robur on a residential corner stands out as an exception the city itself has flagged. The 2017 survey that logged it recorded good health and real size and nothing else, no planting date, no measured age, just a note that this one was worth watching. An investigative piece on Lyon's remarkable trees found it again in 2025, still standing at the same corner of Rue Viret and Rue Francis de Pressense, eight years on from that first record. It grows a fifteen minute walk from the Art Deco tower blocks of Gratte-Ciel, Villeurbanne's landmark 1930s housing project, in the quieter grid of streets just west of it. Nobody has measured its trunk or dated its rings, so this page will not guess a number rather than invent one. What two independent records agree on is simpler: an oak grown too large and too old to belong on an ordinary street, still there, still worth the detour from the park at the Tete d'Or.