This is the only tree on a national flag, and the only one whose timber built both Solomon's temple and the ships of the Phoenicians, at least according to the sources those builders left behind. This page maps every cedar of lebanon on the site, 12 so far across 9 cities.
When seeds reached Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries the Cedar of Lebanon became the ultimate estate status symbol: an aristocrat planted one knowing only his grandchildren would see the famous silhouette, the enormous level layers of dark foliage held out flat as trays. That slow flat-topped shape is the tree's signature and takes a century to appear, so every convincing cedar crown you see is old almost by definition. The cedars mapped so far stand in parks and former estates, oldest first.
Jardin des Plantes, 5th arrondissement. Legend says this cedar crossed the Channel in a hat.
Monteverde. Sources disagree by a century and a half on how old this cedar is, and the disagreement is the most honest thing anyone can say about it.
Gianicolo. This cedar shares its hillside with the dead of a revolution.
Celio. A few meters from Villa Celimontana's Aleppo pine grows its opposite in almost every way: straight where the pine leans, dense and dark where the pine is sparse, native to a mountain range a thousand kilometers further east.
Inverleith. This cedar has a birth certificate few trees in Scotland can match: 1826, recorded by the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh's own staff as one of the first trees they planted after the garden moved to its current Inverleith site.
Bobolino, near Porta Romana. Most of Florence's grand hillside gardens exist because the city briefly ran the whole of Italy.
San Lazzaro degli Armeni. These three cedars did not grow up on this island, they were carried to it.
Centro Storico. This cedar has stood beside the Roman Arena for longer than most of the buildings currently ringing the square around it.
Henbury. John Scandrett Harford, a wealthy Bristol banker, bought Blaise Castle Estate in 1789 and hired the two biggest names in English landscape design of the era, Humphry Repton and later John Nash, to remake it into a Picturesque parkland.
Trsteno. Planted in 1871, this cedar is the youngest of the eight trees Trsteno's own dendrological survey names as the arboretum's oldest documented specimens, and even at roughly 155 years old it already qualifies as a mature, textbook example of a species famous for taking its time.
Grottes-Saint-Gervais. A French naturalist smuggled cedar seeds out of a garden in England, sowed them at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, and a handful of the resulting saplings ended up gifted to a Genevan baron in 1735.
Eaux-Vives. This cedar is a direct descendant of the Beaulieu cedars across town, grown from their seed once the Lullin family decided their own lakeside estate needed the same fashionable tree everyone else was planting.
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