The Platane de Préty

This plane has been under state protection since 1909 and, by the accounts that survive, under nobody's saw since it was planted. It went into a mound at the crossroads beside the church of Préty in 1801, in the place of an orme de justice, the elm under which local justice had once been dispensed. The reason recorded for planting it was the Concordat, the agreement that let priests return to France after the Revolution. A political tree, in other words, put in by a village that wanted the point made in public. Left alone, a plane does this: 34 metres tall, a trunk 5.7 metres round, and a crown spreading 36 metres across the junction. The regional heritage federation puts the height at 33.5 metres, close enough to be the same tree on a different day. Most planes in France have been pollarded back into knuckles and fists. This one has the shape the species actually grows. The protection is the odd part. France classified it as a site classé, a natural monument, on 25 August 1909, decades before most of the country's remarkable trees got anything of the kind. Somebody was paying attention early. It still stands in the open at a village crossroads on the Saône plain, free and unfenced, about three kilometres from Tournus station on the Paris to Lyon line.