The Chinaberry of Square Boucicaut

Here is a subtropical tree holding its fruit through a Paris winter. Melia azedarach, the chinaberry, belongs to the warm belt running from India to China and is normally a Mediterranean planting; the French call it lilas de Perse, Persian lilac, for the loose sprays of small mauve star-shaped flowers it opens in summer. What happens next is the reason to note the address. Those flowers become hard pale yellow berries that stay on the bare twigs long after the leaves have gone, so the tree is at its most conspicuous in December. The berries are poisonous to people, which is worth knowing if there is a child with you. The register gives it 155 centimetres around and ten metres tall, and the independent survey of the seventh arrondissement's nine remarkable trees repeats that same 155. Neither carries a planting date, and the square's own literature says only that many of its hundred-odd trees pass a century, which is a claim about the square rather than about this tree, so its age stays open. Square Boucicaut opened in 1870 as the square du Bon-Marche, named for Aristide and Marguerite Boucicaut, whose department store still faces it: fixed prices, goods you could handle before buying, and the oldest such shop in Paris. Their garden still collects oddities, Chilean araucarias and a very rare Cunninghamia lanceolata among them. The chinaberry is the one that fruits in the cold.