Le Cedre, Noisy Le Roi
Bérengère and the Lebanese Cedar Tree / Bérengère et le cedre du Liban
This story comes from France, from a town outside Paris called Noisy-Le-Roi, with a Lebanese Cedar that became the focal point, emblem and identity of the town. Bérengère tells tales of childhood fun and adventure, enjoying the freedom of being outdoors and playing in the forest – an urban childhood but with many happy hours spent in the trees.
B: I grew up in a small town outside Paris called Noisy-Le-Roi, and we had a cedar tree – “le cedre” that everyone knew and loved and became the identity of the town. It was at the entrance of the town, the first thing you saw, this absolutely giant cedar tree. And I think that everyone loved it – you get emotionally attached to things like that, and it became the logo on so many town businesses, it was also the name of my school. When we went on class trips with school, we’d have tshirts with the tree on it. If you had visitors, you’d take them to see the cedar tree – it was the thing to see in Noisy-Le-Roi! It was a really lovely tree and I was very attached to it.
After planning this interview I researched the cedar tree and I was very sad to see that it had died after I left the town. From what I read, it was potentially hit by lightening but it didn’t show, but maybe did some damage on the inside, and eventually it had to be cut down. It came down in ’98, and you know there was the massive storm in ’99, so perhaps it wasn’t too bad as it could have done so much damage, but it is a shame. There’s a new one in its place – there’s a baby cedar tree there now.
JK: When they took it down, I wonder how everyone would have felt?
B: I’m sure it was a very sad day – it was the emblem of the town, I can imagine that it was a huge deal that it had to be cut down. If you look up things in Noisy Le Roi, there are still lots of cedre references and names, the school, some local businesses.
JK: Is the cedar tree quite common in parks around Paris?
B: No – this one was a Lebanese Cedar, which I think is quite unusual. I looked it up and found this article– it’s called “Le Cedre est mort, Vive Le Cedre!” which is what they saw about the kings of course. It says it’s an endangered species, and you can find it in some old parks dating from the 18th and 19th centuries. You can only find a few specimens now in Lebanon itself. There are at least 2 other specimens in Paris itself, which apparently were brought by the same person in 1734, from England. So these trees came originally from Lebanon, but were brought here to Paris from England. Edward Pocock, who was a chaplain from the British Embassy in Constantinople, brought back cedar trees to England in 1646. He planted them in Berkshire in his presbytery, and his cedar is still alive – it’s over 7.5m in circumference. In 1734 Bernard Jussieu, a French botanist, brought some of these trees back to France from England, and one is in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and the other one is supposedly the one that was in Noisy-Le-Roi. It lived for over 260 years there.
JK: Did they manage to replace your town’s cedar with another of the same variety?
B: Yes – according to the article a young Lebanese cedar, aged 35, and 11 metres tall was planted on 11 December 1999.
JK: That’s quite a significant planting – 11 metres tall!
B: I know!
JK: I can tell that this was very much a tree that you all enjoyed when you lived there – it’s not just something that you look back on having now left the town.
B: Oh yes, we loved it – in the same way that the community here in Pollokshields would be very invested in the cygnets in the park or something like that – well in Noisy-Le-Roi people loved the cedar tree, it was emblematic of the town, it was something common to all of us. I’ll be doing some research to see if I can find out more about it coming down, but I know it would have been really sad. I can imagine there would have been something happening to commemorate it.
JK: I’m also excited to hear about your 3 tier tree house that you mentioned when we first spoke about this project!
B: I lived in a dead end street, and at the end of the street was the forest – it was a big big forest and all the kids used to go and play there, find mushrooms or play games in the forest. It was my neighbour’s dad who built the treehouse. It was not in a huge tree, but more like a bunch of small trees together, quite solid, and from that he was able to build ……… it would have been about 2 metres up for the first level, and then there was another level above, and another above that. There were no walls, but there was a trapdoor in the floor so you could open it up and climb up through up to the next floor on the ladders. It was amazing, all the kids in the neighbourhood would hang out on the tree, and you could make it anything you wanted it to be – you could be a pirate, you could be a school, you could play at anything you wanted. It was great, just lovely!
JK: How many kids would this tree accommodate?
B: At least 9! You could fit a lot of kids in there!
JK: Amazing! And there were so many children that were all happy climbing trees?
B: Yes – that was just what we did.
JK: What a treat for all the kids, especially because the treehouse wasn’t in someone’s garden, it was in the forest.
B: That’s right – and it was there for ages. It lasted for years and years and it’s maybe a surprise that it wasn’t broken sooner. But I guess because all the kids in the neighbourhood played on it, it was looked after and there for a long long time. It was really fun, and right at the entrance of the forest – it was called the ‘cabane’, and we’d say ‘see you after lunch, at the cabane!’. You would meet your friends there.
JK: It sounds idyllic!
B: It was, a really good place to grow up, there were hardly any cars because it was a dead end. And the land around the forest, well it became more ‘looked after’ at some time, but when I was young, it was what we called a ‘talus’– an empty waste ground where nothing was looked after, nettles everywhere. The town levelled it out eventually but before that it was really wild.
Everyone in the neighbourhood would go for strolls in the forest, that was what people did. I remember my parents telling me there were wolves, so I didn’t go too deep into the forest on my own. It was really only quite late on in life that I realised that there weren’t any wolves! Apparently at some time in history the King used to hunt wolves in there – but that’s not for a very long time.
There was another really memorable tree for us as children. Our ‘cabane’ tree was where you entered the forest, but if you went further in you’d reach an abandoned railway – you’d go down the embankment and cross the railway then go back up the other side, then you reached a golf course. There was a really tall tree, and we would all climb up into the tree and then jump down into the golf course from it! I think this really annoyed the golfers – we were followed by enraged golfers sometimes on their golf buggies, and we’d just go and climb back up the tree. You could fit so many children on that tree - it was our entrance to the forbidden golf course!
JK: You come from an idyllic sounding childhoods – what do you think about how our children are growing up, in the city?
B: We have the parks here of course – I think I’m sad that they don’t have as much freedom as I did. I have a responsibility towards that of course, but things have changed, it’s harder to do now. My parents just said ‘come back for lunch’ – they didn’t know where I was, I was somewhere within a mile of the house, and that’s just how it was. But here, well I’m starting to give my daughter more freedom, but at her age, my parents would say ‘don’t go further than the old town’, which was two miles away, so I could cycle on my bike and go places. I remember age nine I severed a ligament playing football, and I was over a mile from my house and had to send my brother to cycle back home and try to get them because I couldn’t walk. That was how things were and it just isn’t like that any more.
I’m trying to let my own children develop these skills – especially in the outdoors, climbing trees and so on – encouraging them to work things out themselves, not step in to help too fast and trying not to say ‘be careful’. I want them to develop these skills. It’s the traffic that makes – the cars make me unconfident about letting them out on their own.
I had so much freedom, and it was really wonderful to be able to just play in the forest. It is lovely to be able to reminisce about it all!
If you would like to see a photo of the cedar in Noisy-Le-Roi, you can do so here
There is more written about Bernard Juissieu here, including an artist’s impression of him disembarking his boat from England with his cedar trees stored in his upturned hat!
After enjoying hearing about the days of childhood fun playing in the forest, this story made me think lots about the access to nature that children of today have, and how this will impact their actions and thinking when they grow into adults and leaders in the future. There are lots of organisations working to make outdoor play and woodlands accessible, in Scotland you can find some of them here: