Chêne de la Vierge à Viroflay

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.