Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly collection during which NPR’s worldwide staff shares moments from their lives and work all over the world.
In over a decade of strolling by 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 buddy lastly pointed it out to me. We have been sprawled on the grass on an ideal Sunday afternoon after I talked about an upcoming journey to Sequoia Nationwide Park in California.
“Well, you know we have a sequoia right here?!” she mentioned, 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 doubtless the work of both Adolphe Alphand, who oversaw the Butte Chaumont’s development, or Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps, town’s chief gardener on the time.
Whoever did it, they in all probability did not anticipate simply how tall a sequoia can develop. This sequoia, now over 100 toes excessive, could be the tallest tree in Paris — and it is nonetheless a child.
It has cousins practically thrice its top. The well-known Normal Sherman Tree in California is considered round 2,000 years outdated — and it stands at round 275 toes tall.
Whereas Normal Sherman could have received the peak recreation (for now), there’s one thing outstanding about gazing at that single sequoia in a northeast nook of Paris — with the city visionary Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s well-known residence blocks spilling out within the distance behind it.
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