A favourite tree – I remember the first one I consciously noticed, said to be 1,000 years old, some of its lowest flat boughs supported by poles themselves the diameter of some trees.

But perhaps the most magnificent cedar I have seen is in a park in Geneva near the railway station.  It has extended its lowest branches so far from the trunk as to simply rest them in the ground, sinking their lowest point into the earth, and then curving back up for a further excursion abroad.

‘… where a carpet of mossy grass spread on each side, studded here and there with a dark flat-boughed cedar, or a grand pyramidal fir sweeping the ground with its branches…’

Source: George Eliot, Adam Bede (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 (1859)), p. 325

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