The Twisted Beech of Square des Arenes de Lutece

Every wild tree of this kind on earth grows in one wood near Reims. The hetre tortillard, or fau, is a twisted-branch form of the common European beech, and its only natural population is the Faux de Verzy, roughly a thousand specimens in the Champagne hills. Why they grow that way has never been settled. This one did not arrive by accident: it is a grafted specimen, planted here around 1905, a deliberate piece of botanical strangeness dropped into the Latin Quarter. The result is a tree that reads as two different trees depending on the month. From May to October it is a low dome of dense leaf, easy to walk straight past, closer to a large shrub than to a beech. In winter the leaves go and the architecture shows: a short trunk turning back on itself, branches spiralling and bending down, some of them trailing to the ground. The city register puts its girth at 110 centimetres, modest for its age, because this form spends its growth going sideways rather than up. Its address is far better known than it is. The square was laid out around the excavated Roman arena of Lutetia, a first-century amphitheatre built for some 15,000 spectators, found again during nineteenth-century roadworks and saved in part by a campaign Victor Hugo lent his name to. The beech arrived long after that argument had been won.