A sequoia tree grows in Paris : NPR

Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly sequence through which NPR’s worldwide group shares moments from their lives and work around the globe.

In over a decade of strolling via my favourite Parisian park, I by no means observed it.

An actual California sequoia — right here within the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. The park, a former landfill, remodeled underneath Napoleon III into one of many French capital’s greenest escapes.

In August, a pal lastly pointed it out to me. We had been sprawled on the grass on an ideal Sunday afternoon once I talked about an upcoming journey to Sequoia National Park in California.

“Well, you know we have a sequoia right here?!” she stated, pointing at a towering tree that seemed nothing just like the others.

I nonetheless cannot say for certain who planted it. The tree went in across the time the park opened in 1867, and it was likely the work of both Adolphe Alphand, who oversaw the Butte Chaumont’s building, or Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps, the town’s chief gardener on the time.

Whoever did it, they most likely did not anticipate simply how tall a sequoia can develop. This sequoia, now over 100 ft excessive, could be the tallest tree in Paris — and it is nonetheless a child.

It has cousins practically 3 times its top. The well-known General Sherman Tree in California is regarded as round 2,000 years previous — and it stands at around 275 ft tall.

While General Sherman could have gained the peak sport (for now), there’s one thing exceptional about gazing at that single sequoia in a northeast nook of Paris — with the city visionary Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s well-known condo blocks spilling out within the distance behind it.

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