The Magnolia of Square d'Ajaccio

This tree comes from the warm swamp forests of the American southeast, and it has grown to twelve metres in a small square off the Rue de Grenelle. Southern magnolia keeps its leaves all year, thick and glossy with a rust-coloured felt underneath, and in early summer it opens cream-white flowers the width of a dinner plate, lemon-scented and gone within a couple of days. Paris put this one on its remarkable tree register at 163 centimetres around, a figure the one independent account of the square repeats exactly. Nobody has recorded its age. The square supplies the only chronological anchor: Square d'Ajaccio, formerly Square des Invalides, was laid out by Adolphe Alphand, the engineer behind most of Haussmann's parks, in the wave of small green squares cut into Paris between the 1860s and the 1880s. Whether the magnolia went in with the square or a lifetime later, no record says, which is why the estimate here is a broad one. It shares its enclosure with a plane tree forty-five metres away that is also on the register, so this is a two-tree garden and ten minutes is enough for both. Magnolia grandiflora is planted across Paris but rarely gets to stand up like this: the species is tender here, and most specimens spend their lives flattened against a warm wall.