The Rabin Memorial Cedar

This tree has a birthday: 25 May 1996. Strasbourg planted a blue Atlas cedar that day in memory of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister shot dead six months earlier by an opponent of the Oslo accords, at the end of a peace rally in Tel Aviv. Ancient trees are almost always dated by estimate. This one carries a date, which makes it both the easiest age in the city to state and the youngest entry here: thirty years, planted by a municipality that wanted a living object rather than a plaque. Cedrus atlantica comes from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and Algeria, where it reaches 40 metres. The Glauca cultivar planted here is selected for needles so grey-blue they read as metallic in flat light, and it holds them all year, so there is no season when this tree is not doing its one visual trick. The city's own register is the only source recording the memorial, which is thin for a fact this specific, though a dated planting is the kind of thing a municipality keeps rather than invents. It grows in the grounds of the Eurometropole's administrative centre rather than in a park, an unglamorous address for a memorial, and that makes one practical detail matter: the grounds follow the building's hours, weekdays and Saturday mornings. Go on a working day. The cedar is outdoors and free to walk up to.