Three named architects have worked on this small garden, and the trees outlasted every plan.
Atlas Cedar
Cedrus atlantica
An Atlas cedar in a European park is safer than one at home. We map 15 of them, in 13 cities.
Cedrus atlantica grows wild in a narrow band of mountains in Morocco and Algeria, and the IUCN now lists the species as endangered there, squeezed by drought, logging and a warming climate its range cannot outrun. In a nineteenth century garden it has none of those problems, which is why the old ones in European parks are mostly enormous and mostly untroubled. Lyon's is the reason its park has the shape it does, with the lawn and paths arranged to give the tree room rather than the other way round. Perugia's took the weight of a trumpeter and an accordionist playing a concert twelve metres up in its crown in 2020. Lucca's, seven metres round, carries the name of a priest who from 1943 hid Jews and partisans in his community's house.
Porto
Of the three cedar species growing in this collection, the Atlas cedar is the one a local garden writer singled out as the most beautiful, an unusually direct piece of praise to volunteer about one...
Dublin
The Atlas Mountains cedar growing in Glasnevin is safer here than at home.
Lyon
This cedar is effectively the reason the park around it exists in its current shape: much of Parc de la Chapelle is built around a single enormous specimen, with the site's open lawn and paths arra...
Lucca
On 25 April 2021 this cedar was given a name.
Rotterdam
Rotterdam's own list of monumental trees calls this Atlas cedar '100+ years old', which would put its planting before 1926.
Madrid
Known locally as El Abuelo, the grandfather, this Atlas cedar grows near the Fuente de la Salud and the artificial stream that cuts through the northern part of Parque del Oeste, a park built on fo...
Photo: Luis Fernandez Garcia (CC BY 3.0)
Bologna
Five metres forty-five around the trunk, thirty-two metres tall, and it grows in the garden of an art gallery.
Geneva
Parc La Grange keeps two enormous cedars from two different mountain ranges.
Segovia
Segovia's one registered notable tree inside the walls is a North African cedar in a small square.
Bergamo
Bergamo's own green space writers call Parco Caprotti perhaps the least known park in the lower town, which is a strange thing to say about a garden holding a 25 metre Atlas cedar, a sequoia and a...
Hilversum
In 1990 the street was repaved and the cedar nearly died of it.
Perugia
In 2020 a trumpeter and an accordionist played a concert twelve metres up in this tree.
This cedar is rooted in the site of a fortress Perugia demolished out of spite.
Strasbourg
This tree has a birthday: 25 May 1996.
Explore by city: Porto · Dublin · Lyon · Lucca · Madrid · Bologna · Geneva · Segovia · Bergamo · Hilversum · Perugia · Strasbourg · every city · or browse all species.