Cedre Imperial Meudon, VisitParis07.com and Phone Book of the World

For two centuries the story of the Imperial Cedar was handed on by word of mouth, from one drawing room to the next, and never written down. It took a publisher of telephone directories — and a threat that was entirely real — for that oral memory to become a story the public could share.

A meeting in the 1960s

The publisher of the Phone Book of the World and of Annuaire du Monde had known Aimée de Heeren since the 1960s. It was she who first took him to the foot of the tree at Meudon and told him what she knew of it — the chain of transmission whose circumstances are set out in chapter 4.

The visit might have remained one more private memory among the many the cedar has inspired. Decades later it turned instead into a piece of editorial work: gathering the accounts, cross-checking them, publishing them.

Gathering what had never been written down

A directory is by nature an instrument of connection: it links names, places and families. Applied to a cedar, the method produced unexpected results. By collecting the stories handed down around the tree and putting them online, the publisher made it possible to reconstruct a chain of transmission two centuries long — from the Empire to the present day.

That work, published on Annuaire du Monde and on the Phone Book of the World, changed the nature of the subject. What had been a loose collection of family anecdotes — a legend of good energy, repeated but never recorded — became a file that could be consulted, checked and argued from. It is out of this effort that the site cedreimperial.com and the domain cedreimperialmeudon.com were born.

VisitParis07.com: putting the tree back on the map of Paris

A file online is still not enough to make a place exist. A visitor planning a stay in Paris has to have some chance of coming across it. That is the part played by VisitParis07.com, a site devoted to the 7th arrondissement — the quarter of the Eiffel Tower, the Champ-de-Mars and Les Invalides.

The pairing sounds odd, since Meudon is not in the 7th. In practice it makes complete sense: the Imperial Cedar stands 6.6 km from the Eiffel Tower, straight along the axis of the Meudon hillside, and the view it gives over Paris is exactly the view that visitors on the Champ-de-Mars are looking for in the other direction. Presented from a site about the Eiffel Tower's own quarter, the tree stops being a suburban curiosity and becomes what it actually is: a viewpoint over Paris, twenty minutes from the Trocadéro.

The logic linking the three sites is the same throughout. The directory establishes the facts, the Phone Book of the World gives them an international audience, and VisitParis07.com gives them a tourist address. Three different doors to a single tree — and three ways, for someone who has never heard of it, to find it.

Rixa von Oldenburg

Great-granddaughter of Victoria Melitta Romanov · descendant of Queen Victoria

In 2021 she lent her help by sharing the family history bound up with the tree. Her account ties the cedar of Meudon directly to the memories passed down in her own family, and gives weight to the stories the directory had brought together.

February 2021: the tree under threat

In February 2021 a property development upended this work of remembrance. Municipal officials were considering putting up a building on the plot that holds the cedar, and declared the tree diseased and dangerous. The prospect was a brutal one: after two hundred years, the witness might disappear before its story was even known.

The response was immediate. In March 2021 the Phone Book of the World put the Imperial Cedar on its home page. The gesture looks modest and its effects were considerable: a site consulted from all over the world gave its most visible space to a tree in the Hauts-de-Seine, to raise the alarm and win support for its protection.

1. 1960s

   The publisher of the Phone Book of the World meets Aimée de Heeren, who takes him to the cedar at Meudon.

2. Decades later

   He gathers and publishes the stories handed down around the tree, on Annuaire du Monde and the Phone Book of the World.

3. February 2021

   A property development threatens the cedar, declared diseased and dangerous by municipal officials.

4. March 2021

   The Imperial Cedar is placed on the home page of the Phone Book of the World to raise the alarm.

5. 2021

   Rixa von Oldenburg shares the family history linked to the tree; cedreimperial.com and cedreimperialmeudon.com come into being.

From memory to mobilisation

Putting the accounts online had an effect no one had anticipated: it brought people together. Readers discovered that a tree planted under the Empire was still standing a few kilometres from Paris; families recognised in those pages memories they had thought of no importance; neighbours understood that the cedar at number 11 was no ordinary tree.

That is how a publisher's work became a tool of conservation. The documentation assembled turned into the case made by a citizens' campaign which, in the same year, reached a remarkable scale — and won. That is the subject of the next chapter.