The Tall Plane of the Serpentine

The register gives this plane a height of 45 metres, which is close to the ceiling for the species anywhere. Nobody outside the city's own survey has checked it with a tape, so treat the figure as the register's, but even a few metres less would be a great deal of plane. It stands beside the Serpentine, the winding stream Alphand cut through the Bois de Boulogne under Napoleon III, when the old royal hunting forest was being remade as a landscape park. The city's fact sheet says the tree belongs to the group that accompanies the stream. Its planting year, 1872, came two years after the Second Empire collapsed, so the stream was dug under an emperor and this tree was planted under the Republic that followed. The trunk is 535 centimetres round, wide for a plane but not the widest in Paris; the height is what sets it apart. It has had a century and a half of Paris weather to get there. There is no gate and no ticket. The Serpentine runs through open woodland near the Route du Lac a Bagatelle, and the register's point puts the tree in a group rather than on its own, so the pin is approximate. Look among the trees along the water for a plane with a trunk over five metres round. If you find it, a photograph and a fix of where you stood would settle the spot for everyone after you.