Metz. Do you know where the strange name of Tschudy Square comes from?

That day, the mayor of Metz tested the zip line and almost stained his suit when he brushed against the ground. The sun was shining and the grass was green on this large square of lawn, located between Rue de Pange and Boulevard de Guyenne, in Metz-Borny. This Saturday, April 26, saw the inauguration of Tschudy Square , developed by the City with tree plantings, a playground, and benches.

But when it came time to give the zip line back to the children, no one in François Grosdidier's municipal team was able to explain where this strange name – Tschudy – came from, with its un-Lorraine sound, which some pronounce Tschoudy and which is also written with an i instead of a y...

It was Dominique Gros's municipality that named the park in 2015 when it was still a wasteland. The choice of name was not random. Jean-Baptiste Théodore de Tschudy was born in Metz in 1734. "When his mother died when he was only one year old, he went to Switzerland to live with his maternal family," says Sébastien Wagner, author of the Dictionnaire historique des rues de Metz (Ed. Serpenoise) . After his army, he inherited the Château de Colombey, a former village annexed in 1812 to the commune of Coincy .

What does this have to do with our square? There's the reference to a Metz personality. And then there's a geographical proximity: the current Colombey farm, which replaced the castle (a little further west), is only 3.4 km away, on the departmental road beyond Brico Dépôt, just after the Colombey cemetery.

The rest of the story sheds yet another light: "This disciple of Rousseau embellished the grounds around the château, notably with exotic plants ," continues Sébastien Wagner. He brought from Asia, Africa and America trees unknown to the people of Metz, such as the black locust, the acacia, the pagoda tree, the American walnut and even the Japanese varnish tree (Wikipedia).

Jean-Baptiste Théodore de Tschudy "wrote articles on horticulture. He even participated in writing the supplement to Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopedia ," the historian adds. With an entire chapter devoted to the cherry tree...

The château burned down during the Franco-Prussian War in September 1870. Its gardens and nurseries were devastated. The president of the Metz Academy, Charles Abel, visited the Château de Colombey after the battle: "I saw nothing but walls blackened by oil smoke. Where I had admired rose beds and groves of exotic trees, there stood some twenty graves of German soldiers as flowerbeds."

Today, the Tschudy Square in Borny, a small green lung in the middle of the buildings, carries, without seeming to, this story of heritage and borders but also of travel and nurseries.

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