At this late summer moment, as the orchards brim with ripe fruit, there are still in France entire stretches of roads where apples, walnuts, and pears fall to the ground without anyone bothering to pick them up. This is not, however, a botanical accident but the heritage of a road regulation established more than two centuries ago and gradually taken up and transformed over time. Behind the trees that line our national roads lies an obscure history, built on Napoleonic taxation, a fight against dust, and a regulation so tenacious that it has traversed the ages without ever being fully repealed.
Apple and walnut trees planted along the roads since Napoleon
If you have ever noticed rows of apple trees, walnuts, or chestnuts lining a departmental road or an old royal route, know that this alignment is far from accidental. It all traces back to the law of the 9th Ventôse in Year XIII, promulgated on February 28, 1805, which regulated the planting of trees along the roads and contributed to a road policy already in place under the Ancien Régime. An instruction from 1805, drafted by the Director General of Bridges and Roads, went further by asking the prefects to select themselves the most advantageous species for each road segment, whether forest trees or fruit trees.
But this obligation did not arise from nowhere. It drew its roots from the Ancien Régime, for an order of May 3, 1720 already obliged landowners bordering royal roads to plant trees on their parcels. A striking administrative continuity, which shows just how central the management of the French roadside landscape has always been conceived as a State affair, long before discussions of territorial planning or landscape heritage.
Why French law still requires planting fruit trees on public land
Contrary to what one might imagine, these plantings were not originally intended for aesthetic reasons. According to the Guichet du Savoir, the roadside dwellers were required to maintain and plant elm trees, beech trees, chestnuts, or fruit trees for strictly practical reasons, with no concern for beautifying the landscape. They were far from the pastoral postcard that these alignments evoke today.
In the 19th century, the justification evolved: the State intensified plantings to reduce the dust raised by vehicles on unpaved roads. A necessity that disappeared entirely with the paving of roads at the beginning of the 20th century, but which did not prevent the regulation from persisting.
Even more surprisingly, another wave of plantings followed in the mid-20th century, this time with poplars intended to supply the wood needed for matches. The majority of these trees were ultimately never exploited by SEITA, leaving behind alignments with no real industrial purpose. This is where the most astonishing revelation lies. Today, the rules applicable to border plantings along the road domain come from a mix of texts—old and modern—as well as local provisions. The heritage of historical regulations remains perceptible, but it would be excessive to present the 1805 law as a universal obligation, still in force in the same terms, to plant fruit trees along the roads.
These free fruits that no one dares to pick despite their legality
A legal detail deserves emphasis, because it changes everything for curious neighbors: those who planted on the State’s domain could maintain a genuine right of use. By requesting authorization, they received ownership and enjoyment of the produce from their trees, in other words the right to harvest the fruits they themselves had planted, even on land owned by the public. A fairly clever arrangement that allowed reconciling public interest with private interest.
Yet, in practice, very few walkers or motorists today stop to pick an apple or a walnut fallen beside a national road. A form of cultural caution, almost instinctive, that persists even though the law does not formally prohibit harvesting fruits fallen on the public domain in many situations. This paradox aptly illustrates the gap that has grown between a 19th-century legal framework and contemporary practices, where the very idea of helping oneself to fruit along a roadside seems almost incongruous, even suspicious.
A road heritage endangered by modern road maintenance and safety standards
The modern rules governing planting distances remain directly inherited from these older texts. Old regulations fixed minimum distances for certain roadside plantings, with possibilities for exemptions. The six-metre rule often cited in this context should not be presented as a single national rule applicable today to all plantings and all roads.
In 1986, the Senate confirmed that this regulation of roadside plantings on the public road domain remained contained in prefectural orders, drawn up according to a standard model specific to each department for national roads.
But this stand of trees, however ancient, no longer serves any functional need today. Neither the dust control nor the wood-for-matches production, nor even the shade for yoked animals of old justifies these alignments anymore.
Only tradition keeps these trees in place, and it becomes a problem in the face of modern road safety requirements. A trunk too close to the roadway presents a risk in the event of a lane departure, which regularly compels road managers to fell these century-old trees in the name of user safety. A concrete dilemma thus opposes preserving a unique European landscape heritage to safety imperatives that are hard to challenge, with no clear nationwide consensus solution emerging on the national scale.
Behind these rows of apple and walnut trees that still line our roads lies therefore a true archaeological layer of French law, where Napoleonic texts continue to dialogue with the pressing concerns of contemporary road safety. The next time you encounter a lone fruit tree at the edge of a national road, you might look at this quiet witness of a time when the State planted trees to fight dust rather than to please the eye differently.
Source: Article 5 – Law No. 89-413 of June 22, 1989 relating to the Roadway Code (legislative part). – Légif (legifrance.gouv.fr)
Article prepared with the help of AI · Our method
