The Buffon Plane

In 1785, four years before the Revolution, the naturalist Buffon planted three oriental planes in the garden he had run for half a century. This is the survivor. Buffon was then the most famous scientist in Europe, author of a 36 volume natural history that scandalized the Church by suggesting the Earth was far older than Genesis allowed. He died in 1788 and missed the Terror by five years; his son went to the guillotine. The tree his gardeners set in the ground kept growing through all of it. Oriental planes were admired in antiquity, and the Romans planted them across their empire for shade. This one received the national Remarkable Tree label in 2001. It stands near the garden's plane alley, wide trunked and mottled, old enough that the institution around it has changed its name three times while the tree kept its place. Its two siblings from the 1785 planting are gone, which makes the survivor the last living tree Buffon is known to have planted.