The Plane Tree of Place Antoine-Rivoire

Lyon's street-tree database holds over 100,000 records, and barely more than half of them carry a planting date at all. Of the ones that do, this plane is the oldest: put in the ground in 1894, at the centre of a square barely bigger than a tennis court in the heart of the Presqu'ile. A city forestry official is on record saying plainly that none of Lyon's plane trees reach the three or four centuries some regional specimens do, so call this the oldest dated tree in the city's records rather than its oldest tree outright. The square itself has buried more history than its tree has years. From the 16th century until the French Revolution it was the parish cemetery of Saint-Nizier, the church that still stands two streets over. The Revolution cleared the cemetery, and the square that replaced it was called Place de la Fromagerie until 1934, when it was renamed for Antoine Rivoire, a founder of Lyon's trade fair and tourism board. The plane tree stands alone at the centre of it now, at the junction of four small streets, on ground that spent three centuries as a burial ground before anyone planted anything there at all.