What is the oldest tree in Berlin?

Dicke Marie, a pedunculate oak in the Tegel Forest. Its age is disputed: the city's forestry office estimates 800 to 900 years, while a 2021 heritage-tree survey concluded a more conservative 500 to 600.

Are Berlin's ancient trees free to visit?

Nine of the ten on this list are free, standing in public parks, forests or street corners. The one exception is the Treskow Plane, which grows inside Tierpark Berlin and requires a zoo ticket.

What is a Berlin Naturdenkmal?

A legally protected natural monument, a designation Berlin has used since 1939 (with a comprehensive ordinance update in 2021) for around 600 individually registered trees, plus a small number of glacial boulders, chosen for age, size, rarity or historical significance.

Why are so many of Berlin's protected trees oaks?

Pedunculate oak is the single most common species on Berlin's natural monument register, ahead of plane, chestnut and beech. Oaks tolerate the region's sandy Brandenburg soil better than most large trees and were the default choice for royal foresters, estate owners and municipal planners alike for centuries.

Germany

Ancient Trees in Berlin

Berlin protects around 600 individual trees as Naturdenkmäler, and most of them are oaks: pedunculate oaks planted by foresters, princes and protestors across four centuries in a city that has been besieged, bombed and divided more than once. Three of the ten below stand in the Tegel Forest alone, home to the capital's record holders for oldest and thickest tree. The rest range from a Louisiana swamp cypress growing in a Prussian palace garden to an oak vandalized as a political protest against the Kaiser it was planted to honor. Most are free to see.

Photo: Maculata, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Dicke Marie

Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 500-900 years (disputed) · Tegel, Reinickendorf

Berlin's oldest tree is older than the city itself. When Berlin got its first written mention in 1237, this pedunculate oak in the Tegel Forest had likely already been growing for over a century, its germination dated to around 1107. How much older it has grown since is a genuine dispute. Forestry officials have long put it at 800 to 900 years. In 2021 the German Dendrological Society's own National Heritage Tree board reassessed the same trunk and came back with a more conservative 500 to 600, arguing that internal decay makes anything more precise a guess. Both numbers can't be right, and this project would rather say so than pick the more impressive one. What isn't disputed: two teenage brothers who summered nearby at Schloss Tegel, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, are said to have named the tree after the family's cook around 1800, and the joke outlived them both. Goethe reportedly rested in its shade in 1778. The oak has grown gnarled and hollow rather than tall, topping out at just 15 to 16 metres, its bulk going into a trunk nearly six metres round instead. On 9 July 2021 it became the first forest tree in Germany named a National Heritage Tree, a small formal honor for something that was already, by any count, the oldest living thing in a city of 3.8 million people.

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Photo: Fridolin freudenfett, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Humboldt Oak

Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 400-500 years · Tegel, Reinickendorf

The thickest trunk in Berlin does not belong to the city's oldest tree. It belongs to its neighbour. A few hundred metres from Dicke Marie, inside the grounds of Schloss Tegel, this pedunculate oak has swollen to 7.80 metres around, wider than Dicke Marie despite being younger by centuries: 400 to 500 years old rather than 800 or more. It takes its name from the same family who has owned Schloss Tegel since 1766 and still does today, one of the few noble German estates that never left its original bloodline. Alexander von Humboldt, the naturalist whose name later ended up on a university, an ocean current and a squid, grew up walking past this oak on his way to the lake. Berlin listed it as a natural monument in 1939, protecting a crown that now spans 18 metres, wide enough to shade a tennis court. The palace itself only opens to visitors on Mondays between May and September, but the park around it, this tree included, stays open year round until sunset, for a suggested one euro donation left at the gate. Stand under it and you are looking at more wood, by circumference, than anywhere else in the German capital, a record that has nothing to do with age at all.

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The Steinlanke Oak

Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 350-400 years · Grunewald, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf

Grunewald's oldest tree survived storms that took its own crown apart. Foresters put its age at 350 to 400 years depending on which survey is cited, a girth measurement that grew from 6.48 metres in 2018 to a commonly quoted 6.70 metres more recently, either of which means it was standing before Prussia existed as a kingdom. It grows at the Große Steinlanke, a quiet inlet of the Havel on the forest's western edge, its trunk gnarled and visibly weathered, the upper crown thinned by what local foresters describe as probable lightning strikes accumulated over centuries. A small sign near the Großes Fenster clearing, by the volunteer lifeguard station, points visitors to it, one of the few individually marked trees in a forest better known for its total size than any single specimen. Grunewald is Berlin's largest contiguous forest, threaded with lake paths popular with swimmers and joggers in summer, and this oak predates every villa and boathouse now standing near it. Reaching it takes real effort: the nearest train station, Wannsee, is nearly an hour's walk away, so most visitors take the 218 bus toward Theodor-Heuss-Platz and finish on foot along the shoreline. Nothing about it looks spectacular from a distance. Up close, the girth and the storm damage written into its upper branches tell a longer story than any plaque could.

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Photo: Fridolin freudenfett, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Swamp Cypress of Charlottenburg

Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) · 200 years · Charlottenburg, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf

A swamp tree from the American South has spent two centuries in a Prussian palace garden. This bald cypress, native to the flooded river bottoms of the southeastern United States, went into the ground in Schlosspark Charlottenburg around 200 years ago, most likely during Peter Joseph Lenné's redesign of the grounds into an English-style landscape park. It has grown to five metres around and over 15 metres tall, dropping its needles every winter like a deciduous tree despite being a conifer, a habit that confuses first-time visitors expecting evergreen. Berlin protects it as a natural monument for a reason that has little to do with its size: its aging, partly hollow wood now shelters the hermit beetle, a rare, EU-protected species that depends on old, decaying timber exactly like this to survive at all. You are now more likely to help that beetle by leaving a tree standing than by planting a new one. The palace itself, the largest surviving Hohenzollern residence in Berlin, charges admission for its state rooms, but the gardens are free and open daily, the formal French parterre near the palace giving way further back to Lenné's looser, English-style paths, where this cypress stands among other 19th-century imports the royal gardeners tested against Berlin's winters. Most of them did not last two centuries. This one has.

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The Great Elm of Treptower Park

European White Elm (Ulmus laevis) · 250 years · Treptow, Treptow-Köpenick

The newest tree on Germany's national heritage register has its roots in a river. This European white elm, standing directly on the Spree's bank in Treptower Park, was declared a National Heritage Tree only on 25 September 2025, one of the most recent additions to a small national list that otherwise mostly honors trees for age or scale alone. This one earns its place partly through rarity: Ulmus laevis is a floodplain elm scarce enough in Germany that a healthy 250-year-old specimen counts as remarkable regardless of size. Its roots reach directly into the Spree, drawing on a water supply few park trees get, which foresters credit for a vigor unusual in a tree this old. The trunk measures 6.35 metres around and the crown rises 25 metres, making it one of the largest trees in a park better known for its Soviet war memorial than its vegetation. It stands near the Rosengarten, a short walk from the boat landing, easily found by anyone walking the riverside path instead of heading straight for the monument. Dutch elm disease wiped out most of mainland Europe's mature elms across the twentieth century, a fungus spread by bark beetles that killed trees by the millions. This species, less favored by those beetles than the more common field and Wych elms, simply kept growing while its relatives disappeared.

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Photo: Z thomas, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Bellevue OakDeclining, under active protection

Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 270 years · Köpenick, Treptow-Köpenick

Berlin's Bellevue Palace burned down in the Second World War. One tree from its grounds did not. This pedunculate oak, likely planted around 1752, once stood among a grove surrounding a rococo pleasure palace built in 1766 for a Hohenzollern prince, a building destroyed in 1945 and never rebuilt. It is the last living witness left in what is now Bellevuepark, a public park in Köpenick unrelated to the better-known Schloss Bellevue across the city that today houses Germany's president. At around 270 years old, with a trunk 5.65 metres round, it has spent the last two decades visibly failing. Local papers have covered its condition roughly every five years since 2006, when its heaviest branch first needed a support structure, through a 40 percent crown reduction in 2014 meant to relieve pressure on its trunk, to a protective fence installed in 2015 after district conservationists, arborists and heritage officials agreed the tree needed distance from foot traffic to have any real chance of recovery. This is not a thriving tree. It is a dying one that Berlin has decided, deliberately and more than once, is worth the effort of trying to keep upright anyway, closer to a patient under long-term care than a finished specimen.

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Photo: Lotse, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Treskow Plane

London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 250 years · Friedrichsfelde, Lichtenberg

The oldest tree at Berlin's Tierpark predates the zoo around it by roughly two centuries. This London plane, its branches so intertwined that some have fused into single, oval cross-sectioned limbs, was already standing when the grounds were still the pleasure gardens of Friedrichsfelde Palace, a Hohenzollern summer residence later owned by the agricultural reformer Johann Carl Sigismund von Treskow, whose name it now carries. Lichtenberg's environmental office estimated its age at 250 years in a 2015 survey, putting its planting sometime in the mid-1700s, two centuries before the palace grounds reopened as a public zoo in 1955. It has grown a trunk 4.65 metres around and a crown 20 metres wide, tall enough at 25 metres to be visible over the enclosures near it. Reaching it requires a Tierpark Berlin ticket, since it now stands inside the zoo's grounds rather than in an open park, an unusual condition for a tree on this list but not a disqualifying one: anyone can buy a ticket at the gate. Look past the animals for a moment and you are standing under a plane tree that has outlasted a palace, survived the transition from royal garden to public zoo, and kept growing through both.

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Photo: Dirk Ingo Franke, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Kaisereiche

Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 143 years · Friedenau, Tempelhof-Schöneberg

Someone tried to kill this oak as a political protest, and Berlin planted a replacement within weeks. The original Kaisereiche went into the ground on 22 March 1879, planted by a local publisher to mark Kaiser Wilhelm I's 82nd birthday and golden wedding anniversary, at what was then a traffic circle on the edge of the new suburb of Friedenau. In November 1883, five years after two separate assassination attempts on the Kaiser had given Chancellor Bismarck his pretext for the Anti-Socialist Laws, someone damaged the tree badly enough that it needed full replacement, an act read at the time as a protest against those same laws. The oak standing at the corner of Rheinstraße and Moselstraße today is that replacement, which makes it roughly 143 years old rather than the 147 the original planting date would suggest, a small but honest distinction most retellings skip. Berlin protects it as a natural monument, and in 2004 a Hohenzollern descendant, Franz Friedrich Prinz von Preußen, unveiled a plaque marking 125 years since the first tree went in. The intersection has no official street name of its own, but Berlin's transit map still labels the bus stop and taxi rank here Kaisereiche, a small act of memory that has outlasted the publisher, the Kaiser, and the empire both men served.

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The Ginkgo of Schlosspark Britz

Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · 140 years · Britz, Neukölln

Berlin's oldest and tallest ginkgo survived something most of its European relatives never had to: being fashionable. Ginkgo biloba reached European gardens in the 18th century as a botanical curiosity, a living link to trees that grew alongside dinosaurs, and wealthy estates across the continent planted them as status symbols rather than for shade or timber. This one went into Gutspark Britz sometime between 1880 and 1890, when royal garden inspector Wilhelm Nahlop redesigned the grounds of a former manor estate into the landscape park still standing today. It has grown a trunk over three metres around and stands close to 20 metres tall, the largest ginkgo recorded anywhere in the German capital. Ginkgos are dioecious, meaning individual trees are strictly male or female, and this one's autumn performance is the reward for the wait: every leaf turns a uniform gold within days of each other in late October, then drops almost at once, rather than the gradual, patchy fade most trees go through. The palace itself, Schloss Britz, charges a small admission fee for its restored period rooms, but the surrounding Gutspark is free and open daily, its grounds having won a national landscape prize in 1997, decades after the ginkgo inside it had already quietly become the biggest in Berlin.

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Photo: Miriam Guterland, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Giant Sequoia of the Tiergarten

Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · 135 years · Tiergarten, Mitte

A tree that can live 3,000 years in California has had 135 of them in central Berlin. This giant sequoia, planted in 1891 in the Englischer Garten section of the Tiergarten, arrived in Europe only decades after the species itself did: the first seeds reached the continent in 1853, imported from California just two years after the tree was formally described at all, setting off a brief craze among wealthy estate owners for what nurseries of the time marketed as Wellingtonia. Berlin's planting, in the city's largest and most central park, is modest by the standards of a species that can exceed 90 metres in its native range, but it remains one of the tallest and bulkiest conifers growing anywhere in the capital. It stands a short walk from Schloss Bellevue, the German president's official residence, in a section of the Tiergarten deliberately landscaped in the looser, informal English style rather than the geometric French gardens found elsewhere in the park. Two world wars swept through the Tiergarten in the twentieth century, and postwar Berliners felled most of the park's remaining trees for firewood during the famine winters that followed 1945. This sequoia, planted decades earlier by gardeners with no idea what the century ahead held, made it through anyway.

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Frequently asked

What is the oldest tree in Berlin?: Dicke Marie, a pedunculate oak in the Tegel Forest. Its age is disputed: the city's forestry office estimates 800 to 900 years, while a 2021 heritage-tree survey concluded a more conservative 500 to 600.
Are Berlin's ancient trees free to visit?: Nine of the ten on this list are free, standing in public parks, forests or street corners. The one exception is the Treskow Plane, which grows inside Tierpark Berlin and requires a zoo ticket.
What is a Berlin Naturdenkmal?: A legally protected natural monument, a designation Berlin has used since 1939 (with a comprehensive ordinance update in 2021) for around 600 individually registered trees, plus a small number of glacial boulders, chosen for age, size, rarity or historical significance.
Why are so many of Berlin's protected trees oaks?: Pedunculate oak is the single most common species on Berlin's natural monument register, ahead of plane, chestnut and beech. Oaks tolerate the region's sandy Brandenburg soil better than most large trees and were the default choice for royal foresters, estate owners and municipal planners alike for centuries.
More on the oldest tree: What is the oldest tree in Berlin? The full answer, with map and directions.
More like this: Several of these trees also appear in Europe's 10 Most Remarkable Ancient Trees.
More cities: Ancient trees in Amsterdam · Ancient trees in Lisbon · Ancient trees in London · Ancient trees in Paris · Ancient trees in Rome · Ancient trees in Tokyo · Ancient trees in Istanbul · Ancient trees in Barcelona · Ancient trees in Kyoto · Ancient trees in Madrid · Ancient trees in New York · Ancient trees in Dublin · Ancient trees in Edinburgh · Ancient trees in Brussels · Ancient trees in Antwerp · Ancient trees in Vienna · Ancient trees in Prague · Ancient trees in Seville · Ancient trees in Porto · Ancient trees in Athens · Ancient trees in Florence · Ancient trees in Milan

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