The Plane of the Fish Market Square

A trunk five metres around is a park tree's measurement. This one is standing on paving in the middle of a medieval city, in a corner of the Place du marche aux poissons, where fish were sold beside the Ill for centuries before the trade moved indoors. The Grande Ile is Strasbourg's original island city and has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1988, the first entire city centre to be listed. Almost nothing grows large here because almost nothing has room to. Paving, cellars and the foundations of the surrounding houses leave very little soil, which is what makes a girth of over 500 centimetres the fact worth reporting about this tree. Somebody made room for it, and successive administrations have left it alone. The city's own register is the only source that describes it. No newspaper has profiled it and no association has labelled it, so a municipal listing and a measurement are what is on record, and no more than that. It works as a five-minute stop rather than a destination. The cathedral is three minutes east, the Petite France quarter about ten minutes west along the water, and the square itself has the Historical Museum on one side and the river on the other, which makes this the rare old-town tree you can photograph with something other than a wall behind it.