Alfred Escher's Giant Sequoia

Alfred Escher built modern Switzerland's railway network, founded the bank that became Credit Suisse and the institution now known as ETH Zurich, and by most accounts had almost no time left over for anything else. In 1858, he apparently made an exception: he planted this giant sequoia at Belvoirpark, his family's lakeside estate, to mark the birth of his only daughter, Lydia. The tree has since grown into the oldest confirmed giant sequoia in Zurich, well over 160 years old, a California native that tolerates Central European frost far better than its coastal redwood relatives and can, in its native range, live past 3,000 years, which makes even this Escher-era specimen a relative sapling by the standards of its own species. Belvoirpark itself began as Escher's grandfather's vineyard hillside, purchased in 1826 and planted with what were then exotic North American species around a new villa; the city of Zurich has owned the grounds since 1901, and what was once a private garden for one of the country's most powerful families is now a public park anyone can walk into and stand beneath a tree Escher planted for a child who would have been barely taller than it herself.