The Old Hazel of Square Maurice-Gardette

French regional television once ran a news piece written in this tree's own voice, headlined "I am 145, stop cracking my hazelnuts and let me age in peace". The grievance is real enough. Turkish hazel nuts are edible, they drop in quantity in early autumn, and people in Square Maurice-Gardette gather them. The two sources differ on when it started. The city register records a planting year of 1882; the broadcast piece says 1879. Three years apart, which makes it roughly 145 years old either way and, more usefully, one of the few Turkish hazels in Paris with any planting date at all. Its trunk measures 265 centimetres around and it stands twenty metres, tall enough to end the argument about hazels being shrubs. Check the bark. This species sheds it once a year in pale corky strips, closer to a birch than to anything you would expect on a nut tree, and on a trunk this size the effect is hard to miss. It shares the square with an olive, a ginkgo and a horse chestnut, none of which crowds it. One caveat on the superlative that follows this tree around. The same broadcaster has called a different Paris hazel, the one in Square Jean-XXIII behind Notre-Dame, the oldest in the city. Both claims cannot be right and nothing settles it, so this one is left as what it demonstrably is: dated, measured and unusually large.