The Treskow Plane

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.