The Plane of Parc Montsouris

This plane tree is older than the park around it. Planted in 1840, it was barely twenty when Napoleon III's engineers began carving Parc Montsouris out of old quarries and windmill land in the 1860s, and they built the park around trees like this one. It is now the heavyweight of the 14th arrondissement: six metres around the trunk and 30 metres tall, officially classified as remarkable by the city. Parc Montsouris became the southern anchor of Haussmann's plan to give every quarter of Paris an English style landscape park, and students from the nearby Cite Universitaire have been reading under this tree for a century. The RER line runs in a cutting through the park, which means several million commuters a year pass within metres of one of the oldest planted trees in southern Paris without knowing it is there. The city classified it formally among its remarkable trees, one of only a handful in the south of Paris.