The Plane of Quai Saint-Bernard

The sculptures are the newcomers. The Jardin Tino-Rossi was laid out along the Seine in 1980 as an open-air museum of modern sculpture, and it was built around plane trees that were already standing: the garden's own record notes old planes on the site before the garden existed. One of them is on the city's register of remarkable trees, on Quai Saint-Bernard, with a girth of 380 centimetres. Which of them, precisely, is where this entry has to be careful. The register lists a plane of that size at this point on the quay and gives a position for it. A second source confirms that old planes genuinely stand here, but nothing beyond the register singles out this trunk from the others along the same walk. By that listing it is the registered tree; by any other evidence available it is one large plane among several, and no planting date is documented for any of them. That is still a good reason to walk this stretch. The quay runs below the Jardin des Plantes towards the Institut du Monde Arabe, the river on one side and bronze and stone works standing free in the grass on the other. The planes are the oldest things in the garden and the only part of it nobody designed.