The Parasol Pine of Parc de l'Orangerie

Strasbourg's register singles this pine out for three things, and one of them is the ivy on its trunk. The other two are shape: a crown flattened into a parasol, and a bole the register calls tortuous, notably tall and notably thick. That is broadly what a Scots pine becomes with time, shedding its lower branches and spreading what is left across the top, until a twisting bare trunk is holding up a flat green ceiling. The ivy is not the problem people assume. It is a climber rather than a parasite, rooted in the ground and using the trunk only to get up to the light. Pinus sylvestris has the widest natural range of any pine on earth, from Spain to eastern Siberia, and the city's own species note says it reaches thirty metres and can live five or six centuries. It says nothing about what this particular tree has managed, and neither does anything else we could find: the register is the only source describing it, as it is for the great beech and the layering thuja in the same park. Those two stand a few minutes away, which turns this into three listed trees on one short walk. Parc de l'Orangerie has been a garden since 1692, which is the reason trees this size are standing near the middle of a city at all.