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 these 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.
0 of 63 visited in Berlin
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 500-900 years · 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.
Photo: Maculata (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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.
Photo: Fridolin freudenfett (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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.
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.
Photo: Fridolin freudenfett (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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.
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · 300-400 years · Mahlsdorf, Marzahn-Hellersdorf
In 2021 Berlin's district register dropped two of Mahlsdorf's protected trees, a Balkan horse chestnut and a black poplar, from its list of natural monuments. A crooked, ten metre lime standing in front of the neighbourhood's oldest building was not one of them. The Mahlsdorf Village Lime, a small-leaved lime outside the old parish church on Hönower Straße, has been protected since 1993 for outright rarity rather than size, a designation it has now outlasted two neighbours to keep. Its age is put at a minimum of 300 years, with local historians tracing the planting to the 17th century. Height was never the point: centuries of storm damage bent and hollowed the crown instead of raising it, leaving a squat, mossy shape barely taller than the church roofline while its trunk swelled to a girth of 4.45 metres, wider than many trees three times its height. By 1995 the district judged the limbs unsafe to leave unsupported and spent 8,000 Deutsche Mark bracing them with steel cables and fencing the base, work that still holds the tree together today. It stands on the old village high street, beside a church that itself survived the Thirty Years' War and the 1945 bombing, two witnesses to the same stretch of road that outlasted the empire, kingdom and two republics built around them.
Photo: Bernard Ladenthin (CC BY 4.0)
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.
Photo: Lotse (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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.
Photo: Dirk Ingo Franke (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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.
Photo: Barfisch (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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.
Photo: Miriam Guterland (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Sessile Oak (Quercus petraea) · 200-400 years · Pfaueninsel, Steglitz-Zehlendorf
Pfaueninsel's oaks were already old when the island became a royal garden. In 1793, Friedrich Wilhelm II ordered the landscaping of this Havel island, and his court gardener kept the oak stand standing rather than clear it, because the trees were already a century old by then. This one, on the meadow near the Schloss, may be one of those originals: at 565 to 567 centimetres around, it was until recently the largest and most striking oak on the island, its short trunk splitting low into one main stem and five curving limbs.
Nobody has measured its age directly, so a range is the honest answer here: somewhere between 200 and 400 years, bracketed from the island's own history rather than a bore sample. What is on record is a more recent event. Surveyors who examined the tree later criticized a crown reduction carried out on it, describing the pruning as unnecessary and unprofessional work on a specimen that deserved better handling.
The island itself has stayed almost untouched since. Pfaueninsel is reachable only by a short chain ferry, has no cars, and keeps the eighteenth century pleasure-garden layout Friedrich Wilhelm II laid out around trees like this one. Peacocks still roam it, the reason for the name. Walk the meadow near the Schloss and this is the oak the Prussian court gardener chose to save.
Sessile Oak (Quercus petraea) per monumentaltrees.com; Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) per baumkunde.de, an unresolved species conflict · 250 years · Pfaueninsel, Steglitz-Zehlendorf
Somebody built a working door into this oak's trunk, and it is still there. The Tuereiche, the Door Oak, stands near the Schloss on Pfaueninsel, its 5.58 metre girth measured just once, in 2017, by a tree registry that has not been back since.
Two sources agree on its size and disagree on its species. One calls it a pedunculate oak, the other a sessile oak, working from what looks like the same underlying survey rather than two independent looks at the tree. Berlin's own list of protected trees on the island names four sessile oaks and no pedunculate ones, which tips the balance without settling it outright.
Its age, about 250 years by the registry's estimate, is a guess made honestly: nobody has cored it, and the door itself, whatever its original purpose, carries no date of its own. What is certain is the island around it. Pfaueninsel became a royal retreat in 1793, and Friedrich Wilhelm II's gardeners built the new landscape around oaks that already stood there, this one very possibly among them.
Reach it by the same short ferry that serves the rest of the island's oaks, then walk toward the Schloss. Look for the door before you look for the tree. Most visitors do it the other way round and miss it entirely.
Sessile Oak (Quercus petraea), per Berlin's official Naturdenkmal register · 100-300 years · Pfaueninsel, Steglitz-Zehlendorf
The most precise thing known about this oak comes from a stranger's holiday photo. In May 2024 a visitor uploaded a picture of a wide-crowned oak north of the Wasservogelteich, Pfaueninsel's waterfowl pond, and the phone's own GPS placed the tree more accurately than any register description on file.
Berlin's protected-tree list already knew it existed: one of four sessile oaks on the island carrying legal Naturdenkmal status, described only by compass bearing and a rough distance from a landmark. No age is recorded anywhere, and none should be invented, though the island's oak stand generally predates the royal garden built around it from 1793.
What the photo confirms is that the tree is alive, healthy and exactly where the register said it should be: a wide, well-formed crown branching low over the path. It sits far enough from Pfaueninsel's other two documented oaks, roughly a kilometre, that it will not fit into the same five-minute stop, but the whole island is under a kilometre long, an easy single walk that takes in all three.
Same ferry, same island, further into it: past the Schloss and toward the pond, where deciduous woodland shelters some of Pfaueninsel's least visited but longest-standing residents.
Photo: S.Makhin, CC BY 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · Pfaueninsel ferry landing, Steglitz-Zehlendorf
Three of Pfaueninsel's protected oaks require a ferry ticket. This plane tree does not. Berlin's Naturdenkmal register lists it at Pfaueninselchaussee 100, the address of the Wirtshaus zur Pfaueninsel, the old inn that has stood at the mainland ferry dock since long before the chain ferry became the island's only public access. The oaks across the water needed the eighteenth century royal garden that grew up around them to survive this long; this plane needed nothing more than the road leading to the crossing point, protected for its beauty and its tie to the place rather than for age or rarity, the reason the district gives on its own designation record. No planting date survives, and no second source beyond the government ordinance has turned up despite real searching, an honest gap rather than an invented history. What makes it worth including anyway is the position: anyone heading for the Pfaueninsel oaks passes directly beside it, on the free side of the water, before they have paid for anything at all. See this one on the way in, whether or not the ferry crossing that follows fits the day.
Sessile Oak, cut-leaf variety (Quercus petraea var. laciniata) · Pfaueninsel, Steglitz-Zehlendorf
Forty five metres from Pfaueninsel's Great Oak stands a second, stranger oak that Berlin protects for an entirely different reason. Where its famous neighbour earned Naturdenkmal status for size and disputed age, this one is registered for rarity alone: a cut-leaf sessile oak, Quercus petraea var. laciniata, a naturally occurring variety with deeply dissected, almost fern-like foliage instead of the plain oval leaf every other oak on the island carries. The two trees stand close enough that a visitor could assume the register was describing the same tree twice. It is not. The government ordinance that protects both lists them under separate numbers, at separate coordinates, for separate reasons, one for its bulk, the other purely because its leaf shape almost never occurs in the wild. No age is recorded for this one at all, since rarity rather than antiquity is the whole case for protecting it, and no source beyond the designation record itself has been found describing this specific tree. Find the Great Oak first, then look forty five metres further for its odd, deeply cut cousin, the rarer of the two despite standing in its more famous neighbour's shadow.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 220 years · Charlottenburg, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf
This plane added 43 centimetres to its waistline in ten years. Measured at chest height it went from 6.00 metres in 2015 to 6.43 metres in 2025, which by circumference makes it the sixth thickest tree on record anywhere in Berlin. A laser measurement in 2025 put its height at 22 metres.
The date usually given for its planting is 1807, an estimate rather than a ring count. That would make it a sapling in an occupied city, the year after Napoleon's army marched through the Brandenburg Gate and took the Quadriga off the top of it to Paris. Everything around the tree arrived later. Lietzenseepark is a twentieth century arrangement of terraces and lakeside paths, laid out around trees that were already big when the surveyors turned up.
Berlin protects it as a natural monument under the number 4-26/B, which is the city saying in administrative language that nobody touches this one. It was photographed alive and in full leaf in May 2025.
The register keeps no age and no girth of its own, so both figures above come from the volunteer surveyors who have been measuring it every five years, which is also how anyone knows it is still growing. From here the shore path runs about 170 metres to a Caucasian wingnut, the other reason this lake is on the map.
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · 100 years · Charlottenburg, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf
Berlin has five Caucasian wingnuts on record, and this one is not yet a hundred years old. The planting date on file is 1927, which by the standards of most trees on this map is recent, and it is not why anyone stops here.
The shape is. The trunk breaks into several stems close to the ground, so the surveyors who measured it gave up on the usual chest height and put the tape around the base instead: 5.94 metres at ground level, a figure they flagged themselves as flattering, because a fork counts as girth in a way a single trunk never does. What it produces is a tree that reads as a small grove growing out of one root plate.
Pterocarya fraxinifolia comes from the Caucasus and northern Iran, where it grows in wet ground along rivers, which is why it has done so well on the edge of a Berlin lake and why it is a rare thing in the drier planting beds of the rest of the city. In midsummer it hangs chains of winged nutlets, half a metre long, off the tips of every branch.
Berlin protects it as natural monument 4-25/B. The most recent published photograph of it dates from June 2015 and the register listing has carried it since, so if you find it changed, tell us. The Lietzensee plane stands about 170 metres along the same shore.
European White Elm (Ulmus laevis) · Charlottenburg, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf
Nobody knows how old this elm is, and that is the honest answer rather than a gap waiting to be filled. Berlin protects it as natural monument 4-27/B at the southeastern corner of the carp pond behind Charlottenburg Palace, and neither the city register nor the surveyors who have measured it twice will put a year on it.
What is on record is size and a near standstill. Its trunk was 4.85 metres around in 2015 and 4.88 metres in 2020, roughly six millimetres of growth a year, the pace of a tree that finished the growing part of its life a long time ago. A laser put it at 21.5 metres tall in July 2020.
The species is the reason to look twice. European white elm is uncommon in city plantings, and Dutch elm disease has taken most of the big elms across the continent over the past century, so a mature one of this girth is a survivor rather than a specimen.
Its address helps. The grounds were laid out in the 1690s as the formal garden of Sophie Charlotte's summer palace and later loosened into an English landscape park, and the carp pond it stands on belongs to that second version. The swamp cypress at the other end of the same park is about a hundred metres away. The last published photographs of the elm were taken in February 2015 and July 2020.
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · Kladow, Spandau
Berlin declared this copper beech a natural monument in 1993, growing inside Landhausgarten Dr. Max Fraenkel, a garden the banker Fraenkel commissioned around 1930 on the Havel shore at Kladow, on ground that had been a brickworks. He hired Erwin Barth, then the city's director of gardens, who laid out a formal rose garden, a perennial-lined cascade and fruit and vegetable plots close to the house, then a looser landscape section further out with a waterfall, ponds and a tea pavilion. The garden changed hands and use across the rest of the century before Spandau's district authorities restored it and reopened it to the public in 2016, with a visitor centre standing where a private family once entertained guests. The beech carries the register's protection for beauty and local historical interest, but no source yet gives its age or girth, so both stay open questions for whoever measures it next. It stands somewhere within the garden's 2.97 hectares, free to walk and easy to reach from central Berlin, on the same route the BVG ferry and the weekend cyclists take out to Kladow. Its crown, dark purple against the garden's greens, is one more layer in grounds that were built up in stages across nearly a century.
Sessile Oak (Quercus petraea) · 90-200 years · Westend, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf
The only tree standing anywhere on the Olympiastadion's 810 by 320 metre grounds carries the name of a Prussian cavalry general. In 1914 organisers at the old Deutsches Stadion marked Victor von Podbielski's seventieth birthday by naming an oak there after him. What happened to that oak is disputed. Berlin's own account of the stadium describes today's tree as roughly 200 years old, its name simply carried forward when the Nazi-era Olympiastadion replaced the earlier ground for the 1936 Games. A local history site tells a harder story: that the original Podbielski oak was felled along with the old stadium, and a replacement planted in 1936 to carry the name into the new arena. Both readings agree on what stands there now: a protected oak behind the Preussenturm at the Osttor, alone on a site built for 100,000 spectators and otherwise stripped of trees. It has stood through the 1936 Olympics, the Second World War and everything the stadium has hosted since, a scrap of green on concrete built for propaganda. It is free to see from outside the stadium fence, or reachable at the trunk with a stadium ticket.
Photo: Fridolin freudenfett (CC BY-SA 4.0)
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · ~180 years · Tegel, Reinickendorf
For decades Berlin's tallest tree was the wrong tree. The record belonged to the Burgsdorff Larch, planted in 1795 by the forester whose name it carries and measured by climbers at 45 metres in 2000 and 42.5 in 2012. Then an airborne laser survey scanned the city's forests in 2021 and put the larch at 41.05 metres. The same scan found a beech 180 metres to the west standing at 43.15, and the title changed hands. Regional press reported the new holder in October 2022 and RBB television filmed it a year after that. The larch itself came down in a storm in June 2025.
Nothing on the ground announces any of this. The beech has no register entry and no protection order, and no name has stuck to it: Friedensbuche and Hohe Buche have both been floated and neither took. Forestry records date its planting to 1843, which makes it about 183 years old, no age at all beside the yews and oaks elsewhere on this site, and quite enough to have stood through the German Empire, two world wars and the forty years when this forest sat at the edge of West Berlin. Its trunk measures 96 centimetres across, so roughly three metres round, which is unremarkable. Height is the whole argument here.
The Tegelsee forestry office has put a sign on the trail pointing at it, which helps more than it sounds: a stand of tall beeches gives away nothing about which one is tallest.
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · Tiergarten, Mitte
Berlin protected this tree in 1993 on two stated grounds, Eigenart und Schönheit, character and beauty, and recorded nothing else at all. No age, no girth, no planting date. Natural monument 1-39/B gives a species and a point in the Englischer Garten, and there the paperwork stops.
The species carries the rest. Pterocarya fraxinifolia comes from the Caucasus and northern Iran, where it grows in wet ground along rivers, which makes it an awkward fit for the drier planting beds of Berlin and explains why almost nothing else in the city looks like it. In midsummer it hangs chains of winged nutlets off the branch tips, half a metre long. Berlin's better known wingnut stands across the city on the shore of the Lietzensee, planted in 1927; by the account of the one Berlin writer who went looking for this one, in 2022, this is the bigger of the two, already tall and broad and still filling out.
It stands in good company. Ten more protected trees sit within about three hundred metres of it, the Tiergarten's giant sequoia among them, which is a dense run of natural monuments for the middle of a capital city.
Nobody has dated it, so nobody can honestly say what it has stood through. If you know when it went in, or you have had a tape around it, tell us.
Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) · ~60 years · Tiergarten, Mitte
Queen Elizabeth II planted this oak herself, on 27 May 1965, on her first visit to West Berlin. The sapling was reportedly raised from stock at Windsor Castle. Almost nothing else on this map arrives with its planter, its provenance and its exact date all written down.
What she put in the ground was an American tree. Quercus rubra, the Northern Red Oak, is neither British nor German, and it has taken to the Tiergarten well: roughly twenty metres now, with a crown that has come up lopsided rather than round. It went into a divided city and has spent most of its life in a reunited one, which is more history than sixty-one years usually buys. By oak standards it is barely started.
Finding it is the part that takes effort. Neither newspaper account gives a coordinate, and there is no register entry to fall back on, because this one was never listed as a natural monument. Both accounts put it near the white Teehaus, and the more recent is precise about the last few metres: to the right of the path, on the way down to the pond. That is as close as anyone has written it down, which is why the pin here points at the teahouse rather than at the trunk.
Nobody has taped its girth either. If you stand in front of it, tell us where you were standing.
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · Schoeneberg, Tempelhof-Schoeneberg
Berlin's official reason for protecting this oak is beauty. The Naturdenkmal order of 2 March 1993 lists it as 7-15/B, a Stiel-Eiche on the oval lawn east of the Kammergericht, and gives two grounds: Schoenheit, and regional-historical interest. No girth, no height, no age. The city looked at it and decided that was enough.
The ground under it has the longer record. Heinrich-von-Kleist-Park was Berlin's first botanical garden, from 1801 until 1903, when the collection was lifted and moved out to Dahlem. A monument on the same lawn still marks what used to stand here. The colonnades and the court building came later, and the lawn stayed open, which is why the oak is visible whole instead of crowded into a hedge.
It is not the largest tree in the park. That is the wingnut, and a bald cypress and a ginkgo grow nearby; two further protected trees stand here as well, a catalpa at the Potsdamer Strasse entrance and a mulberry. But a children's tree walk written with the district's own green-spaces office stops at this one and puts it plainly: here we have a thick, large oak, and it is a Naturdenkmal.
Nobody has dated it. The Berlin register carries no age field for any of its trees, and no other source has filled the gap. If you know when this one went in, tell us.
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · Grunewald, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf
Berlin protected both of these yews for one stated reason: beauty. They hold separate entries in the register, 4-30/B at the south end of the square and 4-31/B at the north, both Taxus baccata, both signed off on the same day in March 1993, and the ground given for each is Schoenheit. Nothing about size, nothing about age.
The square under them was laid out in 1890 for a church that never got built. Six streets of the Grunewald villa colony run into it, and the hexagon left in the middle went to the gardeners rather than the architects. In 1896 the royal garden inspector Hermann Roehr redesigned it as a garden square, with groups of broadleaves and conifers set around semicircular seating, and in 1898 it was named after Johanna von Bismarck, the chancellor's wife. The borough writes that the old tree stock here has been largely preserved to this day.
The two yews stand at opposite ends of that hexagon, roughly sixty metres apart, which makes them one stop rather than two. Yews give little away. Dark, dense and slow, they are the species most often underestimated by people who judge a tree by its waistline.
Neither of these has ever been dated, and the Berlin register records no girth for either. If you have put a tape round one of them, tell us.
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · Dahlem, Steglitz-Zehlendorf
This is the third Caucasian wingnut on this list, which says more about nineteenth-century German gardeners than it does about the Caucasus. Berlin protected it on 2 March 1993 as natural monument 6-40/B and recorded almost nothing else: a species, a place, no age, no girth.
The place is the point. From 1903 until 1966 these grounds in Dahlem were the Koenigliche Gaertnerlehranstalt, the Prussian state's teaching institute for gardeners, where the planting was the syllabus. Species came here to be studied, which is how a walnut relative from the forests between the Black Sea and the Caspian ended up behind what is now a computing institute. The school closed, the garden went quiet for decades, and TU Berlin restored it between 2012 and 2014 as a teaching garden again.
Late summer is when a wingnut declares itself. The seed chains hang out of the crown in strings up to forty centimetres long, each nut carrying two papery wings, and nothing else in this garden does anything remotely like it. The leaves are long and pinnate, closer to an ash than to the walnut it is actually related to.
Nobody has dated this one and nobody has published a girth for it. If you have put a tape round the trunk, tell us.
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · Dahlem, Steglitz-Zehlendorf
Of all the protected trees in this garden, the yew is the one with the longest future. Taxus baccata is the slowest and longest-lived tree in northern Europe, unremarkable at five hundred years, an age at which an oak already counts as ancient and a birch has been gone for centuries.
This one stands in the front garden of the old Koenigliche Gaertnerlehranstalt, the Prussian gardeners' school that held this Dahlem block from 1903 to 1966 and taught planting by planting. Berlin listed the yew as natural monument 6-76/B-1 on 2 March 1993 and the western red cedar a few paces away as 6-76/B-2, on the same day, under the same ordinance. The paperwork treats them as a pair and so does the ground.
Yews hand a visitor almost nothing. Dark, dense, fluted at the base rather than round, with bark that peels in red-brown strips, and effectively impossible to date from outside, because the heartwood rots away while the tree carries on growing perfectly well. That is why Britain's yew estimates swing by a thousand years and why nobody has offered a number for this one.
Berlin records no age and no girth here. If you have measured it, we would like the figure.
Western Red Cedar (Thuja plicata) · Dahlem, Steglitz-Zehlendorf
Germans call this species the giant tree of life, Riesen-Lebensbaum, and Berlin used exactly that name when it put this one under protection as natural monument 6-76/B-2 on 2 March 1993. The register offers the name and no measurement, so treat the word giant as the species talking rather than a surveyor.
The species earns it at home. Thuja plicata grows in the wet coastal forests of the Pacific Northwest, where it passes sixty metres and a thousand years, and where the coastal nations of British Columbia built canoes, longhouses, boxes and woven clothing out of a single tree. Almost nothing else on that coast rots as slowly. European nurseries wanted it from the 1850s onward, and a Prussian school for gardeners was precisely the sort of address that would take one.
This tree stands in the front garden of the former Koenigliche Gaertnerlehranstalt, the teaching institute that ran here from 1903 to 1966, beside the yew protected on the same day. Close up it is unmistakable: flat fanning sprays of scale leaves, fibrous bark running in vertical ribbons, and a pineapple smell when you crush a sprig.
Nobody has recorded its age or its girth. Both are the kind of thing a visitor with a tape measure could settle in a minute.
Juniper (Juniperus virginiana or Juniperus scopulorum; sources disagree on which) · Dahlem, Steglitz-Zehlendorf
Two official-looking sources quote the same protection number for this tree, 6-77/B-1, and name two different junipers. Berlin's own natural monument register calls it a Virginischer Wacholder, Juniperus virginiana, the eastern redcedar that grows from Nova Scotia down to Georgia. The German Wikipedia list of protected trees in Steglitz-Zehlendorf calls the same entry a Zypressen-Wacholder, Juniperus scopulorum, the Rocky Mountain juniper of Colorado and Alberta. Roughly two thousand kilometres of North America separate them in the wild.
That disagreement is not carelessness so much as the nature of the two trees. Both are American junipers with blue-green scale foliage, shreddy bark and small waxy berry-cones instead of woody ones, they hybridise freely where their ranges meet, and telling them apart in a garden is a job for someone holding a hand lens rather than a clipboard.
It stands at the southern edge of the old Koenigliche Gaertnerlehranstalt, the Prussian gardeners' school that occupied these grounds from 1903 to 1966, near the Altensteinstrasse side. A teaching collection is exactly where an unresolved American juniper would end up, and exactly where the label matters.
Berlin protected it on 2 March 1993 and has never published an age or a girth for it. If you can settle which juniper this is, from the foliage or the cones, we would rather have your answer than pick one.
Saucer Magnolia (Magnolia x soulangeana) · Dahlem, Steglitz-Zehlendorf
The saucer magnolia was invented by a retired cavalry officer of Napoleon's army who had decided that growing things was a better use of a life than burning them. Etienne Soulange-Bodin crossed two Chinese magnolias at Fromont near Paris around 1820 and got a tree that flowered young, tolerated cold clay and opened its goblets before the leaves came out. Europe has been planting it ever since. Every saucer magnolia in Berlin descends from that idea.
This one sits on Berlin's protected list as natural monument 6-77/B-2, the Tulpen-Magnolie, signed off on 2 March 1993. It stands on the western side of the old Koenigliche Gaertnerlehranstalt, the Prussian gardeners' school that ran here from 1903 to 1966 and whose grounds TU Berlin brought back as a teaching garden between 2012 and 2014.
For ten days in April it is the loudest thing in the garden, and the protected conifers a hundred metres away are not in the conversation: pink and white flowers the size of a fist, hundreds of them, on bare grey branches. Then the leaves arrive and it goes back to being a broad, quiet, low-branching tree for another year.
No planting date has ever been recorded for this individual, and nobody has published a girth.
Swiss Pine (Pinus cembra) · 120 years · Dahlem, Steglitz-Zehlendorf
A Swiss stone pine belongs at two thousand metres, on the Alpine treeline, in the last thin band of soil before the rock wins. This one is growing on Berlin sand at fifty metres above sea level, and it has been doing it since 1903.
That date is not a guess from the garden's founding. TU Berlin, whose vegetation technology department runs these grounds, says of the Pinetum framing the old rose garden that its Oriental spruce, its Zirbelkiefer and its Weymouth pine still date from 1903, naming the species one by one. Counting forward puts this pine at roughly 120 years, which for a species that regularly passes five hundred in the Alps is early middle age.
The Zirbelkiefer arrived here as teaching material. From 1903 until 1966 the site was the Koenigliche Gaertnerlehranstalt, the Prussian state's school for gardeners, and a conifer collection was a working textbook. In the Alps this tree feeds an entire economy of its own: the nutcracker bird buries its seeds and forgets enough of them to plant the next forest, and what the bird misses goes into schnapps.
A storm in February 2022 took two trees over a hundred years old off these grounds, and the account of it names neither. This Zirbelkiefer was still standing in November 2024, a hundred and twenty-one growing seasons after it was put in.
Katsura (Cercidiphyllum japonicum) · Dahlem, Steglitz-Zehlendorf
For two weeks in October the ground under this tree smells of gingerbread. Drying katsura leaves give off maltol, the same compound that comes out of a hot oven, which is why German named the species Kuchenbaum and Lebkuchenbaum, cake tree and gingerbread tree. You smell it before you work out where it is coming from.
It is probably the largest katsura in Berlin. That is not our measurement but the judgement of Professor Norbert Kuehn, who heads the TU Berlin department that maintains this garden and who opens his own account of the place by naming this tree first. Berlin had already protected it on 2 March 1993 as natural monument 6-78/B, the Japanischer Kuchenbaum.
The species came out of Japan and China into European gardens in the later nineteenth century, arriving in time for a Prussian teaching institute to want one. From 1903 to 1966 these grounds were the Koenigliche Gaertnerlehranstalt, the state school for gardeners, and every rarity here was bought to be studied rather than admired. Katsuras usually rise as several stems from low down instead of one trunk, and the round heart-shaped leaves come out bronze-pink in April, go blue-green by June and finish apricot.
No age has ever been published for it, and the register records no girth.
Eastern White Pine (Pinus strobus) · 120 years · Dahlem, Steglitz-Zehlendorf
This species was once a strategic asset. Eastern white pine grew straight and tall enough to mast a warship, so the British crown reserved the best New England specimens for the Royal Navy and branded them with a broad arrow, which colonists resented enough to riot about in 1772. Europe got its own trees instead, and named them after Lord Weymouth, who planted them at Longleat in the early 1700s. Germany still calls the species Weymouth-Kiefer.
This one dates from 1903. TU Berlin, whose staff maintain these grounds, records that the Pinetum around the old rose garden still holds its original Oriental spruce, Zirbelkiefer and Weymouth pine from that year, naming the three species directly, which puts this tree at roughly 120 years. That is the same year the Koenigliche Gaertnerlehranstalt opened here, the Prussian school where gardeners were trained until 1966.
Berlin protected it on 2 March 1993 as natural monument 6-84/B. It stood through the Battle of Berlin, the closing of the school in 1966 and the long stretch afterwards when these grounds were no longer anyone's classroom, until TU Berlin restored them between 2012 and 2014. A storm in February 2022 brought down two trees over a hundred years old here; the account does not say which two. This pine was photographed standing in November 2024.
Lebanon Oak (Quercus libani) · Tiergarten, Mitte
This oak is protected by law for one reason only: Berlin has hardly any others like it. The city's register lists rarity and nothing else, which is fair. Quercus libani comes from the mountains of the Near East, from Lebanon and Syria into Turkey, and a grown specimen in the middle of the Tiergarten is a long way from home. Berlin made it Naturdenkmal 1-36/B on 2 March 1993.
It does not look much like the oaks around it. Its leaves are long and narrow, edged with small bristle-tipped teeth, closer to a sweet chestnut's than to the rounded lobes of a native oak. This corner of the park lets you check that for yourself. A pedunculate oak protected on the same day grows a short walk east, and Queen Elizabeth II's red oak of 1965 stands about 80 metres off. Three oaks from three continents, within a few minutes of each other.
Nobody has published its age or its girth, and here that leaves a real question open. In the hungry winters after 1945, Berliners cut most of the Tiergarten down for firewood, and the park was replanted from 1949. Whether this tree came through that or arrived with the replanting, no source we have found says. If you know, or you have a tape measure with you, tell us.
Silver Lime (Tilia tomentosa) · Tiergarten, Mitte
Every leaf on this tree is two colours: dark green on top, silver-white felt underneath, so the crown flickers pale whenever the wind turns it over. That underside is where the silver lime gets its name, and it is why Berlin protects this one for its beauty. The register gives regional heritage as the second reason, and made it Naturdenkmal 1-90/B on 2 March 1993.
It is not a Berlin tree by birth. The species is native to south-eastern Europe and Anatolia, so a grown one in the Tiergarten was planted by somebody on purpose, and nobody has recorded who or when.
Its neighbour is another arrival. The Bismarck Monument, Reinhold Begas's bronze chancellor, stood in front of the Reichstag until 1938, when it was moved here to the Grosser Stern to clear the ground for Hitler's plans for the capital. The statue came with a date. The tree did not.
The moment to come is July. Silver limes flower weeks after the city's common limes have finished, and the scent carries well past the trunk, which tends to bring the bees before it brings the people.
There is no age and no girth for this tree in any source we have read. If you know when it was planted, or can put a tape round it, tell us.
European White Elm (Ulmus laevis) · Tiergarten, Mitte
German calls this tree the Flatter-Ulme, the flutter elm, after flowers that hang on stalks long enough to shake in a breeze. In English it is the European white elm, and it is one of the few elms that is genuinely at home here: the species belongs to the river floodplains of central and eastern Europe, the kind of wet lowland Berlin is built on.
That matters more for an elm than for most trees. Dutch elm disease took most of Europe's elms in the twentieth century, and the white elm came through better than its relatives, because the bark beetles that carry the fungus tend to pass it over. A grown one in a city park is still worth stopping for.
Berlin protects this one for its Eigenart, its distinctiveness, and made it Naturdenkmal 1-38/B on 2 March 1993. The register does not say what struck the people who chose it, so you will have to decide that for yourself on the spot. It has company: a pedunculate oak protected the same day stands about 55 metres away, a silver lime about 85, and a Lebanon oak just beyond them, a small grove of separately listed trees east of the English Garden.
Nobody has published its age or its girth. If you have a tape measure with you, we would like the number.
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · Tiergarten, Mitte
Of the protected oaks in this corner of the Tiergarten, this is the only one whose species belongs here. Within a couple of hundred metres stand a Lebanon oak from the Near East and a red oak from North America that Queen Elizabeth II planted in 1965. This one is Quercus robur, the pedunculate oak, the oak of the Brandenburg lowlands and of the Tiergarten itself, which began in the sixteenth century as the Electors' hunting forest.
That does not make this tree a survivor of the forest, and nothing we have read says it is. The Tiergarten has been landscaped, relandscaped, and after 1945 largely cut down for fuel and replanted from 1949. Where this oak sits in that story, no source records.
What the city did record is that it is worth keeping. Berlin made it Naturdenkmal 1-37/B on 2 March 1993, for its distinctiveness and its beauty, two reasons where many protected trees get one. A white elm listed the same day stands about 55 metres away.
It is easy to tell from its famous neighbour. The Queen's oak has leaves ending in sharp bristles and acorns that sit tight to the twig; this one has rounded lobes, and acorns that hang on long stalks, which is what pedunculate means.
No age or girth has been published. If you can measure the trunk, tell us.
Katsura (Cercidiphyllum japonicum) · Hansaviertel, Mitte
Berlin protects this katsura for three reasons at once: beauty, rarity and regional heritage. It became Naturdenkmal 1-43/B on 2 March 1993, and it stands on Altonaer Strasse, diagonally across from the Hansabibliothek.
The setting is half the reason to come. The Hansaviertel was rebuilt for the Interbau exhibition of 1957 as a showcase of modern architecture, and the address the register gives, Altonaer Strasse 6, is a long apartment block raised off the ground on V-shaped concrete stilts. The katsura grows up in front of its balconies, a single tall trunk with a bright green crown reaching several storeys up the facade. Whether it was planted with the building, nobody has recorded, so we will not guess.
The species comes from Japan and China, and it saves its best for October. The small heart-shaped leaves turn apricot and gold, and as they dry on the ground they give off a smell of burnt sugar, strong enough that German calls this the Kuchenbaum, the cake tree. Two more katsuras are on our map in Berlin, one in the TU Schaugärten and one in the Tiergarten south of the Fauler See.
The tree stands on the green in front of a residential block, and we have not confirmed whether that ground is public, so look at it from the street. No age or girth has been published. If you know either, tell us.
Katsura (Cercidiphyllum japonicum) · Tiergarten, Mitte
In October the air under this tree smells of burnt sugar. Katsura leaves give off the scent as they colour and dry, which is why German calls the species the Kuchenbaum, the cake tree. You tend to smell it before you have worked out which tree it is coming from.
The katsura comes from Japan and China, and in Berlin it is a rarity by the register's own word. The city made this one Naturdenkmal 1-35/B on 2 March 1993, for its beauty and its rarity, and the register places it precisely: north of the Strasse des 17. Juni, south of the Fauler See. That pond, at the western end of the Tiergarten, is a protected nature area, and the tree stands between it and the traffic on the great east-west axis.
The rest of the year it is a quieter tree, with small rounded heart-shaped leaves that open with a reddish tinge in spring and stay a soft green through summer. October is when it earns the walk, as the crown goes apricot and gold.
Berlin has at least two other katsuras on our map, one in the Hansaviertel on Altonaer Strasse and one in the TU Schaugärten. This is the one in the open park. Nobody has published its age or its girth. If you know either, tell us.
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · ~160 years · Zehlendorf, Steglitz-Zehlendorf
This oak was planted to mark a battle, one year to the day after it was fought. On 2 September 1871, the first anniversary of the Prussian victory at Sedan, a young pedunculate oak went into the ground at Zehlendorf's village crossroads and called it a Friedenseiche, a peace oak, for the end of the Franco-Prussian War. A bronze plaque on the south side of the trunk still says so.
That makes it one of the few trees on this map with a birthday. It is about 155 years old, and it has had a busy junction for company the whole time. Beside it stand the old village church and the Heimatmuseum Zehlendorf; around it the village became a suburb, the suburb became part of Greater Berlin, and after 1945 it ended up in the American sector of a divided city. Berlin made the oak Naturdenkmal 6-31/B in 1993.
Traffic has been the hard part. In June 2020 a heavy limb broke off and came down in the middle of the rush hour. The response was to give the roots more room: the sealed ground around the trunk was to be opened up, and the bench that used to circle it was taken away.
So do not expect to sit under it any more. Stand at the corner of Potsdamer Strasse and Berliner Strasse instead, and read the plaque.
Fontanesia (Fontanesia phillyreoides) · Moabit, Mitte
Berlin protects this one because almost nobody else has one. The city's register names rarity first, and Fontanesia earns it: a quiet relative of the privet and the olive, native to Asia Minor and almost never planted in a German park. Most people crossing Moabit's Kleiner Tiergarten walk past it as just another shrub.
That is the reason to look. It is not here for size, and the register makes no claim that it is. It was made a Naturdenkmal on 2 March 1993 for two reasons, rarity and what Berlin calls landeskundliche Gründe, local-history grounds, a phrase the city uses for trees that tell you something about the place they stand in. The register does not spell out what that something is here, and we will not guess.
There are two of them. Berlin lists them separately, as 1-49 and 1-50, about 25 metres apart on the east side of Stromstrasse, and a visitor sees them as a pair, so we treat them as one stop. Both were photographed in leaf in June 2024, which is the best evidence we have that they are still doing well.
What nobody has recorded is how old they are or how big. Berlin's register carries neither age nor girth, and no other source we found fills the gap. If you know when these were planted, or you have stood beside them with a tape measure, tell us.
Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) · Tiergarten, Mitte
Most of Berlin's protected trees made the list for being rare, old or tied to the city's history. This one was protected for its looks. When Berlin named it Naturdenkmal 1-42/B on 2 March 1993, the register gave a single reason: Schönheit, beauty.
It is a tulip tree, a North American species, and it stands on the Luiseninsel, a small island inside the Grosser Tiergarten reached along the park's own paths. That is a fitting address for a tree judged on appearance, because the tulip tree is one of the easiest in the world to tell apart once you know the trick. Its leaves look as if someone took scissors to them: four lobes and a flat, notched tip where every other leaf would come to a point. In early summer it carries upright cups of pale green and orange that give the species its name, often high enough that you notice the fallen petals before the flowers.
It was photographed in full leaf in May 2024, so it is alive and well, and it is the only tulip tree among the Berlin trees we map.
What the register does not give is an age or a girth; Berlin's Naturdenkmal records carry neither, and we found no other source that dates it. If you know when it was planted, or you have measured the trunk, tell us.
Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) · Wedding, Mitte
Botanists knew this tree as a fossil before anyone knew it was still alive. The dawn redwood was described from fossil remains in 1941, and only a few years later living trees turned up in central China. Seed went out to gardens around the world from 1948, which is how a species once thought extinct ended up in a park in Wedding.
That history sets a ceiling on its age, if not a number. A dawn redwood in a Berlin park cannot predate that postwar seed, so this one is decades old rather than centuries, and its claim to a page is rarity and looks rather than years. Berlin agreed: it made the tree Naturdenkmal 1-44/B on 2 March 1993 for both, Schönheit and Seltenheit, beauty and rarity.
It stands in the Volkspark Rehberge, opposite the entrance to the open-air stage, and it is a conifer that behaves like an oak. Its soft needles come out bright green in spring and turn a rusty orange-brown in autumn before they drop, leaving a bare, tapering frame all winter. It was photographed in leaf in June 2025.
Berlin's register gives no planting date and no girth, and we have not found another source that does. If you know when it went in, or you have measured the trunk, tell us.
Italian Maple (Acer opalus subsp. obtusatum) · Mitte
Berlin did not protect this maple for one reason. It gave four. When it became Naturdenkmal 1-102/B-2 on 2 March 1993, the register cited its character, its beauty, its rarity and local-history grounds, all at once.
The register calls it Bosnischer Ahorn, the Bosnian maple, and it is a form of the Italian maple from the mountains of southern Europe and the Balkans, not a tree you expect on one of the most visited squares in Berlin. It stands on the Gendarmenmarkt at the Charlottenstrasse corner, south-west of the Deutscher Dom.
It does not stand alone, and that matters if you come to find it. About 14 metres away is a Norway maple, registered beside it as 1-102/B-1, and from a distance the two read as a pair of ordinary maples. Up close they part ways. The Norway maple has broad leaves whose lobes end in fine sharp points. The Italian maple's leaves are smaller, with shallow, blunt, rounded lobes, which is what its subspecies name, obtusatum, means. Look at a leaf before you look at the trunk.
About 50 metres north is a third protected tree on the same square, a Japanese pagoda tree.
Nobody has published an age or a girth for this maple; Berlin's register records neither. If you know when it was planted, tell us.
Kentucky Coffeetree (Gymnocladus dioica) · Mitte (Maerkisches Viertel)
In German this tree is called the Geweihbaum, the antler tree, and in winter you can see why. The Kentucky coffeetree grows few, thick, blunt twigs, and once its leaves are down the crown looks less like a tree than a rack of antlers held up against the sky. It keeps that look for a long part of the year, because it is among the last trees to leaf out in spring and among the first to drop in autumn.
The English name comes from its seeds. Settlers in North America are said to have roasted them as a coffee substitute; the raw seeds and pods are toxic, so this is a story to enjoy rather than test.
Berlin made this one Naturdenkmal 1-53/B on 2 March 1993 for a single reason, rarity, and it is the only coffeetree among the Berlin trees we map. It stands on the Märkischer Platz, opposite Wallstrasse 53, and was photographed in leaf in May 2024. The leaves, when they come, are worth a look: each one is a doubly divided frond of many small leaflets, and a single leaf can reach the better part of a metre.
It also makes an easy pair with the velvet-leaf euodia on Fischerinsel, about 600 metres away.
Berlin's register records no age and no girth for it. If you know when it was planted, tell us.
Korean Evodia (Tetradium daniellii) · Fischerinsel, Mitte
Its German name is not flattering: Samthaarige Stinkesche, the velvet-haired stinking ash. Gardeners elsewhere call the same species the bee-bee tree, which is kinder and closer to the point. It flowers in high summer, after most trees have finished, with broad flat heads of small white flowers, and in July and August it can hum with bees from some distance away.
It is not an ash at all. Tetradium daniellii belongs to the citrus family and comes from northern China and Korea, and the stinking part of the name refers to the sharp smell of its crushed leaves. Berlin made this one Naturdenkmal 1-54/B on 2 March 1993 for beauty and rarity, and it is the only one among the Berlin trees we map.
It stands on Fischerinsel, the southern end of the Spree island in the middle of Berlin, level with the Australian Embassy at Fischerinsel 5. The tree is seen from the public street and green strip; the embassy grounds are not open, and you do not need them. It was photographed in leaf in May 2024.
It sits about 600 metres from the Kentucky coffeetree on the Märkischer Platz, so the two make an easy short walk between two rarities.
Berlin's register gives no age and no girth. If you know when it was planted, tell us.
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · Mitte
The Humboldt University keeps two protected ginkgos, one in each of its courtyards, and Berlin registers them as two separate natural monuments. This is the southern one, Naturdenkmal 1-6/B-1. Its twin, 1-6/B-2, stands about 60 metres to the north, in the other courtyard of the same building.
Berlin listed both on 2 March 1993. The reasons depend on who you ask. The state register gives beauty and regional heritage. The Wikipedia list of natural monuments in Mitte gives rarity and distinctiveness. That makes four reasons across two sources, and not one of them is age.
The moment to come is November. A ginkgo's whole crown turns butter gold and then drops its leaves in a day or two, so the window is short and easy to miss.
The tree also starts a short walk. A protected red horse chestnut stands in the forecourt a few steps away, and a protected London plane grows on Bebelplatz across the street, so three of Berlin's natural monuments sit within a couple of hundred metres of each other.
University courtyards are normally open by day, but we have not confirmed the hours, so check at the gate. Nobody has published an age or a girth for this ginkgo. If you have a tape measure and a minute, tell us what it comes to.
Red Horse Chestnut (Aesculus x carnea) · Mitte
Berlin's register files this tree as a Fleischrote Rosskastanie, a flesh-red horse chestnut, which is the German name for it and does the flowers no favours. In English it is simply the red horse chestnut: the same upright candles as the familiar white kind, in red, and less common.
It stands in the forecourt of the Humboldt University's main building, on the western side, and you do not need to go through a gate to see it: it is in plain view from the pavement of Unter den Linden. Berlin made it Naturdenkmal 1-5/B on 2 March 1993, for its beauty and for regional heritage.
Come in May. That is when a horse chestnut puts its candles up over the whole crown, and on this one they come out red rather than white.
It is also a stop on a very short walk. One of the university's two protected ginkgos stands in the south courtyard a few steps behind it, and a protected London plane grows on Bebelplatz across the road.
The register records no age, no girth and no height for it, and neither does any other source we found. If you know when it was planted, or have measured it, tell us.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · Mitte
This plane tree grows on Bebelplatz, the square where the 1933 book burning took place, and nobody has recorded whether it was already standing there to see it. That is the honest version, and it is worth saying plainly, because the temptation with a tree on a square like this is to give it a witness's part it may never have had.
What is recorded is where it stands and why it is protected. It grows on the green beside the Operncafe, in the space framed by the State Opera, St Hedwig's Cathedral and the Humboldt University. Berlin made it Naturdenkmal 1-7/B on 2 March 1993, for its beauty and for regional heritage. The register's point marks the trunk itself, so our pin is exact rather than a guess somewhere on the square.
So the tree makes no claim on the square's history, and the square makes none on the tree's age. What you get is a protected London plane in the middle of Mitte, free to stand under.
Two more of the city's protected trees are a short walk away across Unter den Linden: a red horse chestnut in the university forecourt and a ginkgo in the courtyard behind it. Together they make a walk of a few minutes.
The register gives no age, girth or height for this plane. If you have measured the trunk, or know when it was planted, tell us.
White Mulberry (Morus alba) · Kreuzberg
This tree belongs to the species whose leaves fed the silk trade, and it grows in a hill park in Kreuzberg. White mulberry leaves are what silkworms are raised on. What we cannot tell you is whether this particular tree has anything to do with that story. No source records when or why it was planted, and a white mulberry in a Berlin park could have arrived for silk, for fruit or simply for shade.
What Berlin does record is that it is worth keeping. The city made it Naturdenkmal 2-30/B on 2 March 1993, citing its distinctiveness and regional heritage. The register places it in Viktoriapark, east of the waterfall, and its coordinate marks the tree itself.
The time to come is midsummer. In June and July a white mulberry carries pale, sweet fruit, and a tree in a public park tends to leave the evidence on the path beneath it.
Viktoriapark is free and open at all hours, about ten minutes on foot from Mehringdamm. Find the waterfall and look to its east side.
Nobody has published an age, girth or height for this mulberry. If you know its story, or have put a tape around its trunk, tell us.
Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) · Pankow
This is a conifer that goes bare every winter. A bald cypress grows needles like a pine and then, each autumn, turns them copper red and drops the lot. It is a rare tree in Berlin's parks, and this one, north of the rose garden in the Bürgerpark Pankow, is under state protection.
Berlin made it Naturdenkmal 3-48/B on 2 March 1993, for its beauty and for regional heritage. The register's point marks the tree itself, so the pin takes you to the trunk rather than to a corner of the park.
The moment to come is October into November. The whole crown changes colour and then strips itself. The copper is the reason to make the trip; the bare frame that follows is why the species is called bald.
It is not the only one on our Berlin map. Another bald cypress stands in the palace garden at Charlottenburg, on the far side of the city, so a reader who likes this one has a second to find.
The Bürgerpark is free, about ten minutes on foot from S and U Pankow. Nobody has published an age, girth or height for this tree. If you have measured it, or know when it was planted, tell us.
Black Poplar (Populus nigra) · Prenzlauer Berg
The black poplar is a native tree in Berlin and a rare one, which is a combination worth pausing on. This one stands by a pond in Prenzlauer Berg, halfway along the path on the south shore of the Kreuzpfuhl, in the Jürgen-Kuczynski-Park.
Berlin made it Naturdenkmal 3-16/B on 2 March 1993. Many of the city's protected trees are listed partly for regional heritage, for what they say about the place. This one was listed for its beauty and for natural-history reasons instead: for what it says about the species and the landscape rather than about the people around it.
The pin is a good one. The register gives a point for the tree itself, and the Wikipedia list of Pankow's natural monuments gives its own coordinate about 40 metres away, which for two sources in a park is close agreement. Walk the south shore path and look for it near the middle.
A poplar by water is in its element, and the Kreuzpfuhl is a pond ringed by a public park, free to walk around. It has no single day of glory. It is the kind of tree you come to because you know a native black poplar is a rare thing to find in Berlin.
No source records its age, girth or height. If you have put a tape around the trunk, tell us what it comes to.
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · Mitte
The square in front of Berlin's natural history museum holds five protected trees, and the two that give the group its name are copper beeches, one off each wing of the building. The museum charges for what is inside. The square, and everything growing on it, is free.
Berlin's register lists them one by one. Naturdenkmal 1-75/B-1, designated on 2 March 1993, is the copper beech by the east wing, and it is where our pin stands. Its partner, 1-75/B-2, is by the west wing, about 70 metres across. A beech, 1-76/B, stands by the east wing too, another protected tree, 1-77/B, by the west, and an oak, 1-78/B, out on the square itself. The register gives the east-wing copper beech its place for beauty and for regional heritage.
We have mapped them as one stop rather than five, because that is how you will meet them: a single forecourt, all within about a hundred metres, a minute from the U-Bahn.
Copper beeches are worth seeing through the year. Their leaves open purple in spring, darken through the summer and turn copper before they fall, so the pair looks different with every visit.
No source gives an age, girth or height for any of the five. If you have measured one, tell us which, and what it came to.
Sessile Oak (Quercus petraea) · Tiergarten
Berlin's natural monument register lists more than six hundred trees, and only two of them are protected for four reasons at once. This oak is one. When the city made it Naturdenkmal 1-86/B on 2 March 1993, it cited distinctiveness, beauty, regional heritage and scientific grounds. Most entries in the register cite a single reason; only three in the whole list mention science at all.
It is a sessile oak, the less common of the two oaks in Berlin's parks. The pedunculate oak is the one you meet everywhere. This one stands at the corner of Scheidemannstrasse and the Grosse Querallee, near the Carillon in the Tiergarten.
The register's point marks the tree itself, and a photograph on Wikimedia Commons from May 2024 is titled with this exact place, Scheidemannstrasse at the corner of the Grosse Querallee, near the Carillon, so the pin is a firm one.
What the register does not say is what the scientific interest is. It records the reason and leaves the explanation out.
The Tiergarten is a free public park, open at all hours, about ten minutes on foot from the Hauptbahnhof, and the Tulip Tree of Luiseninsel is under a kilometre away if you want to keep walking.
No source we have found gives an age, a girth or a height. If you know any of those, or why scientists cared about this oak, tell us.
Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) · Tiergarten
Berlin's most famous traffic island holds a 67-metre column, a gilded Victoria and a protected tree from North America. The column itself is a transplant: it was moved here from in front of the Reichstag in 1938 and 1939, when the Nazi planners rebuilt the Grosser Stern as a showpiece junction. Whether this black locust was already growing on the island then, or went in afterwards, no source records.
The species has its own long road to Berlin. Robinia comes from the eastern United States and reached Europe in the early seventeenth century, through the Paris garden of Jean Robin, the French king's gardener, whose name the genus still carries. It took to the dry, sandy soils of Brandenburg so well that it now grows wild across them. Its wood is famously hard and its twigs carry paired thorns, and in early summer it hangs out clusters of white flowers that smell of honey and draw bees from a long way off.
The island sits in the middle of a busy five-way roundabout. You reach it on foot through the pedestrian tunnels under the traffic, which come up on the island itself.
Berlin lists the tree as Naturdenkmal 1-34/B and records nothing about its size or age. If you stand under it with a tape measure, send us the girth.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · Tiergarten
On the night of 15 January 1919, Freikorps soldiers shot Karl Liebknecht in the dark beside the Neuer See and reported that he had been killed trying to escape. A memorial stone by the lake marks it now. This London plane stands a short walk east of the water, south of the Grosser Weg, and nobody has recorded whether it was there to see any of that.
What it is, at least, is easy to say. The London plane is a city tree by temperament: it sheds its bark in flat plates, which is one reason it shrugs off soot and exhaust, and the shedding leaves a trunk patched in olive, cream and grey like old camouflage. In winter it keeps its seed balls, bristly brown spheres on long threads that hang on after the leaves have gone. Berlin planted the species along its streets by the thousand. Here, among the lawns and paths east of the lake, it has room to spread.
The Neuer See is one of the busiest corners of the Tiergarten, with a beer garden and rowing boats on the water, so this is a tree a lot of people walk past without knowing the city lists it. It is Naturdenkmal 1-56/B.
The register gives no age, girth or height. If you put a tape around the trunk at chest height, tell us what it says.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · Tiergarten
The London plane may not be from London at all. It is a hybrid of the oriental plane and the American sycamore, and the cross seems to have happened by accident in the seventeenth century, somewhere the two parents grew side by side. One theory puts it in a London garden; another in Spain, which is why botanists also call it Platanus hispanica. This one stands a few steps north of the Spanish Embassy, which is either a coincidence or the tree being diplomatic.
Its spot is a crossing: Lichtensteinallee meets the Grosser Weg here, two of the paths that thread the south-western Tiergarten towards the zoo and the Landwehr Canal. Hybrid vigour is part of why the London plane is everywhere in European cities. It grows fast, takes heavy pruning and poor soil, and puts up with air that kills more delicate trees. A plane in a park, with no kerb pressing on its roots, gets to show what it does when nobody is in its way.
Berlin protects it as Naturdenkmal 1-87/B. A second protected plane stands about 200 metres to the north-west, east of the Neuer See, so the two make an easy pair on one walk.
The register stops at the species and the spot. No age, no girth, no height. If you know any of them, or measure the trunk yourself, we would like to hear.
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · Tiergarten
This oak grows on a strip of park squeezed between two kinds of water: the Neuer See on one side, the Landwehr Canal on the other. One is a park lake, with rowing boats in summer. The other was dug between 1845 and 1850 to carry barges around the crowded Spree, and still carries tour boats past the zoo today.
It is a pedunculate oak, the common oak of the north German lowlands, and probably the single most useful tree a park can hold. Oaks support more insect life than almost any other European tree, and the insects feed the birds: woodpeckers, nuthatches and jays all work an old oak. In a good year the ground beneath it fills with acorns on long stalks, the peduncles the species is named for, and jays carry them off, bury them and forget a good share.
Berlin protects it as Naturdenkmal 1-88/B, and a volunteer photographing the city's natural monuments for Wikimedia Commons left ten pictures of it, all taken within a few metres of the trunk.
What nobody has written down is how old it is or how big. If you walk the strip between the lake and the canal, a girth measurement would tell us a great deal.
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · Tiergarten
Two protected oaks stand on this stretch of canal bank, about 25 metres apart, and Berlin lists them as separate natural monuments, 1-20/B and 1-97/B. Standing there, you will read them as one place: a pair of pedunculate oaks on the green strip along the Landwehr Canal, a few minutes from the zoo.
The street is named after Katharina Heinroth, and she is worth knowing about. A zoologist, she took over the Berlin Zoo in 1945, when the war had left it in ruins and fewer than a hundred of its thousands of animals were still alive. She rebuilt it over the following decade and was the first woman to run a German zoo. The bank that carries her name is a quiet one: a canal path, joggers, the odd tour boat sliding past.
Pedunculate oaks are the native oak of this lowland, the tree that carries its acorns on long stalks and its leaves on almost none. Whether these two were planted together, or one came long after the other, no source says.
The register records nothing about their age or size. If you measure either trunk, or better both, tell us which one and what you found.
Oak (Quercus sp.) · Tiergarten
Berlin's register and the photographer who has followed this oak through every season cannot agree on what it is. The register, which protects it as Naturdenkmal 1-95/B, calls it a pedunculate oak. That photographer, posting winter and summer pictures to Wikimedia Commons since 2024 and citing the city's own tree-cadastre number 17-229, calls it a sessile oak. Both are native here and they hybridise freely, so this is not a careless mistake on either side. It is a genuinely awkward question.
You can try to settle it yourself. A pedunculate oak hangs its acorns on long stalks and holds its leaves almost stalkless, with two small ear-like lobes where the leaf meets the twig. A sessile oak does the reverse: acorns sitting tight to the twig, leaves on a clear stalk and tapering at the base. Come in autumn and look at both.
The tree stands between the Bellevueallee and the Strasse des 17. Juni, the broad avenue named for the East German uprising of 17 June 1953, when workers across the GDR struck and Soviet tanks put them down. Schloss Bellevue, the German president's residence, is a few minutes away.
The register gives no age, girth or height. Tell us which oak you think it is, and if you can, how far round the trunk.
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · Tiergarten
Berlin's register takes the trouble to say exactly which beech this is: Gewoehnliche Buche, Rot-Buche, the plain green common beech. The name trips people up. Rotbuche means red beech, but it refers to the pinkish timber, not the leaves, and the purple-leaved copper beech planted in so many old parks is a separate form. This one is the original, the tree that would cover most of central Europe if people let it.
That is not an exaggeration. Left alone, beech outcompetes nearly everything on ordinary soils, mostly by shade: its leaves are layered so tightly that very little light reaches the ground, and seedlings of other trees give up underneath it. The bark stays smooth and silver-grey into old age, which is why beech trunks across Europe carry carved initials that have stretched with the tree for decades.
Its spot is south of the Kleiner Stern, one of the path junctions in the eastern Tiergarten, and east of the Rosengarten. In late October and early November the crown goes from green to copper and orange, and the leaves that drop make a dry, rustling carpet that lasts most of the winter.
Berlin lists it as Naturdenkmal 1-96/B and records neither its age nor its size. If you can get a tape around the trunk, we would like the figure.
European White Elm (Ulmus laevis) · Tiergarten
This elm flowers in March, weeks before its own leaves, in small purple-brown tassels that dangle on threads and are easy to mistake for nothing at all. A white elm in flower looks faintly smoky against a pale sky, and most people crossing the bridge nearby will walk past without looking up.
Ulmus laevis is at home in river meadows and on wet ground, and the Tiergarten, laid out on the low, damp land along the Spree, gives it what it likes. Old trees of the species can do something few European trees do: grow plank-like buttresses at the base of the trunk, the kind of thing you expect in a rainforest rather than a Berlin park. Whether this one has started, the register does not say. You will have to look.
It is the second protected white elm in the Tiergarten on our map; the other stands east of the English Garden. A third registered elm, listed together with beeches, grows north-west of here near Tiergartenstrasse 30. Berlin knows this one as Naturdenkmal 1-92/B.
No age, girth or height has been recorded. If you measure the trunk, or find buttresses at its foot, send us what you see.
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 500 years · Tiergarten (Zoologischer Garten), Mitte
Berlin Zoo calls it the eternal oak, and says it has been giving shade for 500 years. If the zoo's figure is right, the tree was already old when the zoo itself opened in 1844, the first in Germany. The zoo also gives it a second name, the Columbus oak, without explaining it.
Treat the number as the owner's word rather than a measurement. It is a round figure, no method is given, and nobody has published a girth to check it against. A photograph of the tree on Wikimedia Commons is captioned the same way, about 500 years old. So the honest version is: about 500 years, according to the zoo.
There is a second thing we cannot quite close. Berlin's register protects one pedunculate oak inside the zoo, Naturdenkmal 1-52/B, south of the hippo house, listed in 1993 for its distinctiveness and for regional heritage. That is the tree we have mapped. It is the only protected oak the register lists in the grounds, which makes it almost certainly the eternal oak, but no source we have read says in so many words that the two are the same tree. The zoo counts eleven protected natural monuments on its ground in all.
You will need a ticket, and our pin comes from the register rather than from a visit, so expect to look around south of the hippo house. If you have stood under it, tell us whether we have the right one.