The Horse Chestnut of Square Louise Michel

The best-known figure for this chestnut is forty centimetres out of date. Two published accounts of the garden give it a trunk of 330 centimetres; the city register now measures 370. Nothing has gone wrong. The tree kept growing while the paperwork stood still, which is the most cheerful sort of disagreement between sources. It was planted in 1902, and the register and both accounts agree on that, which makes it one of the better-dated trees on this page. In 1902 the basilica above it was a building site: work on the Sacre-Coeur ran from 1875 to 1914, so the chestnut spent its first dozen years growing under scaffolding and cranes. The garden itself arrived later still, laid out in 1927. Horse chestnuts are the most familiar tree on this list and the most taken for granted. This one is 21 metres tall under a broad even crown, and it does the two things the species is loved for on schedule: white flower spikes standing upright all over it in May, conkers split out of their green cases on the path in September. One correction to the name Paris gives it. The marronnier d'Inde is not from India and not from here either. It came out of the mountains of the Balkans in the sixteenth century, and Europe has been planting it in squares ever since.