The Weeping Beech of Square Carnot

This beech is only fifteen metres tall and its trunk is five and a half metres round. A weeping beech spends its life growing down as much as up, and after some 160 years this one has become a dome you walk around rather than a tower you look up at. The city's register dates it to 1864; the square's own page says 1865. Either way it is older than the square. Square Carnot was laid out in front of the Chateau de Vincennes only after the Quartier Carnot cavalry barracks went up in 1889, by which time the beech was already a quarter of a century in the ground. Its hardest night came in December 1999, when the storm that crossed France took most of the square's trees. The city counts this beech among the few old survivors and calls it one of the finest specimens in the square. Fifty-five metres away stand the square's two great planes, planted in 1918 and more than twice its height. The contrast is the reason to see both. The planes go straight up; the beech spreads and falls. A tulip tree from 1862, a persimmon from 1875 and a giant thuja from 1912 keep them company, all survivors of the same storm. Come in autumn, when the whole hanging crown turns gold and copper together.