The Fig Tree of Square Georges Cain

A fig has no business standing ten metres tall in the open in Paris. Ficus carica is a Mediterranean species, knocked back by hard winters and usually trained flat against a warm wall this far north, and this one carries a trunk 145 centimetres around with nothing but sky above it. That size at that exposure is most of the reason the city lists it as a remarkable tree at all. Nobody wrote down when it was planted. Every account of it repeats the same undated phrase, over a hundred years old, and the register designates it without naming a year, so the honest position is that it is old and that no one recorded how old. The ground is better documented than the tree standing on it. Square Georges Cain was laid out in 1923 as an open-air store for the Musee Carnavalet next door, and pediments, columns, carved fragments and statues pulled from demolished Paris buildings sit among the planting, including a bronze by Aristide Maillol. Before any of that, these blocks were market garden, part of the culture Sainte-Catherine that fed the medieval city. Figs are shorter-lived than almost everything else on this list and considerably less patient with frost. This one has spent decades winning that argument inside a walled square that runs warmer than the street outside, which is the quiet trick of the place and probably the reason it is still here.