Notre-Dame-du-Chêne, Viroflay's parish church, took its name from an oak: one already centuries old at the edge of the Forêt de Meudon when the church went up in 1966. A 2009 tape measure, 527 centimetres round, puts it somewhere between 450 and 550 years old. Through the cholera epidemics of the 1850s and 1870s people walked out to pray beside it and left ex-votos in its bark, and some still do. Free to reach, on a road verge, no gate. A second champion tree stands a short train ride away in La Celle-Saint-Cloud.
0 of 2 visited in Viroflay
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 500 years · Gaillon, on the edge of the Forêt de Meudon
The church is named after the tree, not the other way round. Notre-Dame-du-Chêne was built in 1966 and took its name from an oak that had been standing at the edge of the Forêt de Meudon for centuries before anyone laid its foundation stone. The same tree sits on Viroflay's coat of arms.
Nobody has counted its rings. What exists is a tape measure: 527 centimetres round when it was last recorded in 2009, a trunk 1.68 metres through, which at the rate a slow oak puts on wood works out at somewhere between 450 and 550 years. The sixteenth century, roughly, and the range is as tight as the method honestly allows.
Its second life began with cholera. Through the epidemics that went through the Paris region in the 1850s and 1870s, people walked out here to ask for help and left something behind, which is how it became an arbre à clous and an arbre à loques, a nail tree and a rag tree. Ex-votos still hang on it, and it is still used as an open-air place of worship. A hundred and fifty years of visitors, for a reason that has nothing to do with its girth.
France's Arbres remarquables register added it in 2002, and the national forestry office has since had its health formally assessed. Thirty metres tall, alone on a road verge, out of the wood it once belonged to.
Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa) · 330 years · La Châtaigneraie, La Celle-Saint-Cloud
This chestnut's shape was cut into it by winegrowers. Its branches used to be lopped to make stakes for the vineyards, which is why it grew low, wide and twisted rather than tall, with bark that spirals up the trunk and a crown now eighteen metres across.
It was once a lonely tree in the middle of a meadow. Then the town grew all around it, and La Celle-Saint-Cloud did something towns rarely do for a tree that is in the way: it redesigned a square, Place du Général Audran, specifically to show it off. The chestnut is the centrepiece, in a residential quarter called La Châtaigneraie, the chestnut grove.
The European contest page, French Wikipedia and a Paris news site all give it about 330 years, and Le Parisien reported in 2022 that it went in under Louis XIV. That is an estimate repeated consistently, not a ring count, and nobody has published its girth. If you have measured it, tell us.
In 2021 it was voted Île-de-France's tree of the year, then won France's national public vote, nominated by the heritage-tree association A.R.B.R.E.S. At the European final in 2022 it placed eighth of sixteen, with 28,119 votes.
It does not stand in Viroflay. It stands in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, a five-minute walk from the station, direct on Transilien line L from Paris Saint-Lazare; from Viroflay the trip takes a change at Saint-Cloud.