The Plane of Parc de Bercy

Five metres twenty-eight of trunk, 35 metres of crown, and not one written word about when it was planted. That is what the city's register of remarkable trees holds on this London plane in Parc de Bercy. The ground has a past even if the tree's papers do not. In the nineteenth century this stretch of the Seine bank was given over to wine warehouses, and the park now covers that site. The city's sheet for the park counts about 1,200 trees and says some of its planes are centuries old. It does not say which ones. In 2015 the park's trees as a whole received the national Arbre Remarquable de France label. It is tempting to read this plane as a survivor of the warehouse years, one of the trees that stood among the stores before the park was laid out. That may be true. No source we have found says so, and we would rather leave the question open than hand you a story that only sounds right. So here is what is known. A plane of this girth is a very large tree for Paris, big enough for the register to give it a number of its own. How old it is, and whether it remembers the wine trade, is open. If you know, or have an old photograph of this corner of Bercy that shows the trunk, tell us.