The Twin Planes of Avenue Winston Churchill

A trunk five and a half metres around is a great deal of plane tree for a Paris street. Two of them stand about eleven metres apart on Avenue Winston Churchill, on the axis between the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais, and the city registers them separately: one at 5.05 metres around and 28 metres tall, the other at 5.55 metres and 30 metres. From the pavement they read as a single pair, which is how they are treated here. Neither has a planting date. The register carries none and no archive found so far supplies one, so their age is inferred from girth alone and the range stays deliberately wide: certainly more than a century, possibly close to twice that. What is datable is the ground under them. Alphand laid out these gardens for Haussmann in the 1860s, and the avenue and its two palaces were built for the Exposition Universelle of 1900. The trees either predate that construction or went in with the replanting that followed it, and no source says which. London planes take city air better than almost anything else, shedding their bark in plates rather than letting soot build up on it, which is why Paris has hundreds of thousands of them. Reaching this girth still takes a long time and a spot nobody widened a road through. These two got both.