The Oriental Plane of Square Louise Michel

Millions of people climb past this tree every year on their way to something else. Square Louise Michel is the terraced garden below the Sacre-Coeur, the one with the long staircase up the Butte Montmartre, and three of the city's registered remarkable trees stand within 150 metres of each other inside it. This oriental plane is the oldest and the largest of the three. It was planted in 1857, which puts it 70 years ahead of the garden around it: the square itself was only laid out in 1927. The city register and the square's own published description agree to the centimetre, 520 centimetres round and 28 metres tall, which is a rarer kind of agreement than it ought to be. One caveat on the paperwork. A local survey of the 18th arrondissement describes an oriental plane of 470 centimetres planted in 1840, close enough to invite confusion and different enough on both figures that it is probably a different tree somewhere else in the district. The numbers given here are the register's and the square's, not that survey's. Everyone on the steps is looking up at the basilica. The plane is off to the side, doing nothing in particular, and has been doing it since before there was a basilica to look at.