The Plane of Square Montholon

Square Montholon has two enormous plane trees and the city has written down the history of only one of them. This may be that one. The official description of the square records a plane planted in 1872, standing 32 metres tall with a trunk 432 centimetres round. The register of remarkable trees lists a single plane here, at this exact spot, at 470 centimetres and 27 metres. Those are not the same numbers. Either this trunk has put on 38 centimetres since that record was made, which is entirely ordinary, or the register has pinned the other tree of the pair, which is also entirely ordinary. Nothing available decides it, so the age given here stays broad, well over a century and probably a good deal more, rather than claiming 1872 for a tree that may not have earned it. What is not ambiguous is the trunk in front of you. Four metres seventy puts it among the larger planes anywhere in Paris, in a garden small enough to cross in a minute. The square opened in 1863, one of the small public gardens cut into the city while Haussmann was rebuilding it, and was redesigned in 1981. It sits off the Rue La Fayette in the 9th, gates open in the morning and shut at night, with the pair of planes doing most of the work of making it feel older than the rest of it is.