The Cedar of Jussieu

Legend says this cedar crossed the Channel in a hat. In 1734 the botanist Bernard de Jussieu carried two seedlings from England to Paris, and when the pot broke on the journey he is said to have finished the trip with a tree cradled in his tricorne. The story is probably embellished, which the Museum's own historians admit, but the tree is real enough: the oldest cedar of Lebanon in France, planted on the slope of the labyrinth in the royal medicinal garden that became the Jardin des Plantes. It was a sapling when Louis XV ruled, stood through the Revolution while the garden's aristocratic patrons lost their heads, and watched the menagerie fill with animals confiscated from Versailles. Nearly three centuries on, its trunk is a metre and a half thick and its flat crown is visible across the garden. A plaque at its base records the planting date for anyone who thinks to look up from the path.