The Fused Plane of the Champ de Mars

This plane was already some seventy years old when Gustave Eiffel began building his tower beside it. The city's printed fact sheet dates it to 1814, and in 1887 the iron started going up close by. It has stood through every crowd the tower has drawn since, from the 1889 Exposition on. It does not look like one tree, and it may not be. The city's sheet says its shape probably comes from six young planes set in a tight group, whose trunks grew into each other until they fused. The sheet hedges with probably, nobody has documented the planting, but the result is plain enough when you stand in front of it, a single base of about seven metres around built from several stems. The numbers vary a little with the source. The sheet and the city's 2015 label brochure give 705 centimetres; the register now says 710. Heights run from 20 to 27 metres depending on who measured, and the register itself leaves the planting date blank, so the 1814 rests on the city's printed material alone. In 2015 the A.R.B.R.E.S. association gave it the national Arbre Remarquable de France label. The ground around the base of the tower is fenced and visitors normally pass a security check to reach it. The tree stands within those enclosed grounds. It is older than the tower by three quarters of a century, and it is very easy to walk past.