You may have read other hydro-botanical portraits before coming across this one, but please note that it was with the Loire that I embarked on this passionate exploration of our planet's rivers, travelling to other latitudes to observe stranger, taller, more densely populated trees, covered in snow, drenched with water or with dry, hard leaves. I made this entire journey starting from my little tree of birth, which I am sharing with you here.

Let me now introduce you to France's last great wild river, nearly 1,000 km long, whose source is in Ardèche, a stone's throw from the Rhône. Its history is mysterious: scientists believe that it once branched off towards the Seine to flow into the English Channel — a Sequanian Loire, a remnant of a distant past.

The Loire lives, almost dances, tracing loops and meanders like a carefully choreographed dance. Like a tree, it changes with the seasons and is constantly evolving: forming loops, lines, bulges, interlacing and hollows, the outline of the trunk and branches evokes a perfectly mastered dance. Just as a tree changes with the seasons, growing, flowering, expanding, losing its leaves, shrinking and twisting under pressure, so too does the course of the Loire swell and change shape each winter, before entering a dormant period in summer, when it contracts and a new river bed sometimes forms.

The embryo of the tree trunk takes shape in the slopes of the Massif Central, where small streams become torrents, then a navigable river from Saint-Étienne onwards. After Roanne, it calms down: the middle Loire begins, like a mature tree. It is here, between Orléans, Blois and Tours, that the tree-river has seen the blossoming of castles, kingdoms, works of art and historic cities, whose pollen inspired many across of Europe. Further down, in the lower Loire, its trunk widens and its dead arms – the ‘boires’ – fill with water in winter. This lower part of the tree, industrial and oceanic, connects Angers, Nantes and Saint-Nazaire, a painful reminder of slavery but also a crossroads of trade, river development and maritime exchange.

If the Loire were a tree, it would be an old pedunculate oak: majestic, deeply rooted, nourished by moisture, bearing a thousand years of memory. A tree used in shipbuilding, barrel-making and Gothic architecture, the oak embodies the Loire: noble, slow, powerful, deeply rooted, standing in our landscape like a ghost, a witness of the Europe that was, the Europe of vast oak forests that once covered entire regions.

The Loire Oak, Quercus Ligeris