The Turkish Hazel of Square du Temple

Most people picture a hazel as a shrub they can see over. This one is sixteen metres tall with a trunk 235 centimetres around. Corylus colurna, the Turkish hazel, is the outsized relative of the nut-bearing hedge hazel, native to the Balkans, Anatolia and the Caucasus, and it grows as a single straight trunk under a tidy cone of a crown. Nineteenth-century park designers liked it for the shape, and cities still plant it because it shrugs off heat, compacted soil and bad air. Nobody wrote down when this one was planted. Paris has other Turkish hazels of similar or greater girth that do carry dates, including one in Square Maurice-Gardette recorded as 1882, so comparison puts this tree somewhere between eighty and a hundred and fifty years old, and that is as precise as the evidence gets. The ground has a heavier history than the garden suggests. This is the old Temple enclosure, the Paris headquarters of the Knights Templar, and later the prison where Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were held before their executions. The tower came down in 1808 and the garden that replaced it dates from the 1850s. It now holds 71 trees and 191 varieties of plant, a good share of them foreign: a ginkgo, a Japanese pagoda tree, a Caucasian wingnut, a golden rain tree and a Chinese quince, all within a few minutes of the hazel.