Copenhagen's oldest trees inside the city belong to named people: a sailor's mulberry planted for Christian IV's silk venture, the cycad Frederik Liebmann carried home from Mexico in 1842, Thorvaldsen's black locust. The biggest and oldest are not in the city at all. Eight ancient oaks stand in the parkland 11 to 13 km north, most of them in the royal deer park at Klampenborg, and one of them is over ten metres round and has stood there since roughly the year 1200. Those eight are a half day out, not a city walk.
- HHans Erik LundCopenhagen ambassador
0 of 49 visited in Copenhagen
Black Mulberry (Morus nigra) · 350-420 years · Slotsholmen
King Christian IV tried to build a Danish silk industry the way his contemporaries elsewhere in Europe were doing it, by planting mulberry trees to feed silkworms, and Copenhagen has pointed at this tree as the survivor of that venture ever since. The Danish tree register records it as a black mulberry, Morus nigra, which is the fruiting mulberry rather than the white one silkworms are raised on, so read the silk connection as a story the city tells rather than a fact anybody has proved. Tradition credits a sailor who brought it home from Asia rather than a court gardener.
What the register does state is its age: one of the oldest mulberry trees in Denmark. It stands against the south-eastern gable of Proviantgarden, the naval arsenal Christian IV began in 1603 to supply his warships, facing the Royal Library, on ground that once fronted a working harbour basin where vessels docked to be provisioned and armed. It is five metres tall and grows the way old black mulberries do, leaning and sprawling rather than standing up straight. The silk venture itself mostly failed, Copenhagen's climate never suited silkworms the way Christian IV hoped, and the street name Silkegade nearby is the closest most Copenhageners now get to the story.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Mexican Cycad (Dioon edule) · 184 years · Indre By
In 1842, the Danish botanist Frederik Liebmann sailed to Mexico and came home with, among other specimens, a small cycad that looked more like a stunted pineapple than anything resembling a tree. It has spent nearly two centuries since then growing at its own unhurried pace in Copenhagen's Botanical Garden, first at the garden's earlier city-centre site and then, from 1874, in the Palm House built specifically to keep tropical and subtropical plants alive through Danish winters. Cycads are not actually related to palms or ferns despite resembling both; they are among the oldest living groups of seed plants on Earth, largely unchanged since long before flowering plants existed, which makes a 184-year-old specimen barely middle-aged by the standards of its own family. Liebmann died in 1856 at just 43, only 14 years after bringing the plant home, but his cycad has outlived him by more than a century and a half and remains, by the garden's own account, its oldest living specimen and one of its genuine star attractions, a slow-growing plant that has simply outlasted everyone who ever went looking for one.
Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) · 185 years · Slotsholmen
Bertel Thorvaldsen spent more than 40 years in Rome becoming Europe's most celebrated Neoclassical sculptor before returning home to Copenhagen in 1838 to a hero's welcome, and this multi-stemmed black locust growing beside the museum built to house his life's work is said to have come home with him, grown from seed he carried back from Italy. Denmark's dendrological society surveyed the tree in 1995 and recorded a trunk over three metres around, splitting into several stems rather than one, and estimated its age at up to 155 years at that time, consistent with a planting soon after Thorvaldsen's actual return. That would put the tree, and not just the museum, among the direct physical legacies of a sculptor whose bronze and marble work now sits in collections from the Vatican to Warsaw. Black locust is not a species anyone would plant deliberately for its connection to fine art. It is a hardy, fast-growing tree valued more for binding loose soil and producing useful timber than for looking distinguished, which makes its adoption into Thorvaldsen's own story feel almost like an accident that stuck, a workmanlike species growing beside one of Europe's grandest personal museums, surveyed precisely enough by Danish tree recorders in 2008 to give this project one of its few confirmed coordinates.
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · 300-360 years · Indre By
Kongens Have is Copenhagen's oldest public park, laid out from 1606 for King Christian IV beside his new Rosenborg Castle, and its formal linden avenues were planted soon after: Kavalergangen and Damegangen, the two clipped alleys nearest the castle, date to around 1664 and 1700. Almost none of those original trees survive; both avenues have been replanted more than once in the four centuries since. Husalle, a third avenue running parallel to the garden's main axis a little further north, has fared differently: its lindens are described by garden historians as among the oldest living trees in Denmark, having escaped the repeated replacements that emptied the more formal avenues nearer the castle of their original planting. The garden itself has survived far more than ordinary wear. It has hosted royal pleasure grounds, public promenades, and, in recent years, a summer sound installation that lets speakers hidden in ten of its trees tell stories to anyone who walks close enough to trigger them, a very modern use for trees old enough to have shaded Danish kings centuries before recorded sound existed. Husalle's lindens do their storytelling the old way, simply by having outlasted almost everything planted around them.
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · 140-145 years · Frederiksberg C
This ginkgo is male, and the female it pollinates lives on the other side of the street. The two trees have never touched. The university library, writing up the garden's own history, calls it the largest ginkgo in the collection and gives 1883 as its planting year, which would make it about 143. That date comes from that one source and nowhere else, so read it as the garden's account rather than a measured fact.
It is planted in the middle of a large stone mound, which is a strange thing to do to a tree and suits this one. Ginkgo biloba is the last surviving member of a lineage older than flowering plants, and the Danish name for it, tempeltræet, points at the temple courtyards in China and Japan where the final populations were kept alive by monks while the wild ones disappeared. The garden around it was laid out in 1858 for the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural College and has been legally protected since 1965.
Protection is not immortality. The blood beech planted the year the garden opened, which the official heritage listing still describes as the thickest tree here, was felled in 2018. Nothing suggests the ginkgo has gone the same way and the species is famously hard to kill, but the newest dated confirmation we could find of this one is not recent. The garden is free and open from sunrise to sunset.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Handkerchief Tree (Davidia involucrata) · 40-100 years · Nørrebro
What looks like flowers on this tree are leaves. For roughly two weeks in May the handkerchief tree hangs hundreds of paired white bracts through its crown, each pair a modified leaf wrapped around a small dark ball of actual flower, and Danish names it better than English does: duetræ, the dove tree. Davidia involucrata grows wild in the mountains of western China and reached Western cultivation only in 1904, through the plant hunter Ernest Wilson. It is still an uncommon thing to find in Denmark, and this one is multi-stemmed, so in May the bracts come at you from several directions at once.
Nobody wrote down when it was planted. The Danish Dendrological Society surveyed Assistens in November 2019, put a GPS point on this tree, measured 1.4 metres around its stems and recorded it alive and healthy. That is the honest limit of what is known here: a girth, not an age. The range on this page is inferred from that measurement and from how recently the species arrived in Danish gardens, not read off any record.
It stands in section A of a cemetery Copenhagen treats as a park. People run, read and eat their lunch here, a few hundred metres from the graves of Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard.
Weeping Beech (Fagus sylvatica 'Pendula') · 80-150 years · Nørrebro
Every weeping beech is a graft, and on this one the join is in plain sight. About a metre up the trunk there is a visible union where a cutting of the pendulous form was fixed onto ordinary beech rootstock, and the surveyor who measured the tree in November 2019 noted that the grafted top is now putting on wood faster than the stock beneath it, so the trunk steps outward where the two meet. Look for that step before you look at the curtain.
The same survey recorded something less comfortable: a large wound at the base of the trunk. The tree was logged as alive, 3.29 metres round and 15 metres tall, but it is a healthy crown standing over an open injury, which is worth knowing rather than glossing over.
Weeping beech became a Danish cemetery fashion in the nineteenth century under the name sørgebøg, mourning beech, planted to hang over a grave the way a mourner leans over it. No planting date survives for this one. The 80 to 150 years on this page is worked back from the girth, not counted.
It stands in section B, just right of the Kapelvej entrance, which makes it the first serious tree most visitors to Assistens Kirkegård walk straight past.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) · 100-180 years · Nørrebro
The thickest tree at Assistens is also the least exotic species in it. At 4.19 metres round, this sycamore out-measures every tree the Danish Dendrological Society registered inside these walls, including the rarities people actually come to see, and it does it as a common European maple that seeds itself into any gap it can find. Twenty-two and a half metres tall, one trunk to about two metres up and then a fork into two, alive and healthy at the November 2019 survey, rated regionally noteworthy.
Assistens was not built for strolling. It opened in 1757 outside the city ramparts as an overflow burial ground, taking the dead that Copenhagen's crowded parish churchyards could no longer hold, and the famous names arrived later. The city then grew out past it, Nørrebro packed in around it, and the place slowly turned into what it is now: a walled park with graves in it, where on a warm afternoon the living comfortably outnumber the mourners.
No planting date exists for this maple, and the 100 to 180 years given here is inferred from its girth rather than counted. What is certain is the measurement, taken with GPS in the field, and that nothing else registered in this cemetery is thicker. Section C, a little southwest of the section's centre.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · 120-220 years · Frederiksberg
This beech is registered under the name of a boat trip. Danish dendrologists filed it as Bøgen ved Bådfarten, the beech by the boat trip, which makes it the easiest tree on this list to find: walk to the jetty in Frederiksberg Have where the flat-bottomed boats set off around the canals, and the tree is the big one standing over you. Its trunk is 4.68 metres round and 1.49 metres across, measured in October 2016 and recorded alive.
The water it stands beside is the reason the garden looks the way it does. Frederiksberg Have began around 1700 as a Baroque layout of straight lines below the royal palace, then was redrawn between 1798 and 1804 into a romantic landscape of winding canals, islands and staged views, which is the fashion this beech grew up inside. The garden is protected under Danish conservation law and free to walk into.
Its age is not documented anywhere. The 120 to 220 years here comes from girth alone, and the garden's own heritage listing is careful on the point: the trees it names as three centuries old are the lindens on Mathildehøj, not this beech. Only one other tree in Frederiksberg Have carries a thicker trunk, and it is a short walk away in the same garden.
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 130-250 years · Frederiksberg
This oak has no recorded birthday, but the garden gives it a ceiling. Frederiksberg Have was laid out as royal ground around 1700 and rebuilt between 1798 and 1804 into the romantic landscape park it still is, so whatever the tree's exact age, it cannot be older than the garden that had to exist before anyone planted in it. What was measured rather than guessed: 4.95 metres round, 28.8 metres tall, 1.58 metres through, surveyed by the Danish Dendrological Society in October 2016 and rated municipally noteworthy. That is the thickest trunk of any tree on this list standing inside the city itself; the oaks out in the deer park north of town are thicker again.
The 130 to 250 years on this page is arithmetic on that girth against how fast a parkland oak puts on wood, not a date from any record, and it should be read as the wide guess it is. A pedunculate oak growing in the open with room on every side thickens faster than one shut into a wood, which is exactly the situation here, and one reason the upper end of that range is probably generous.
The garden around it is public, protected and busy: lawns, canals, the palace up on its hill, boats in summer. The oak has watched the whole thing turn from a royal retreat into the city's back garden.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Honey Locust (Gleditsia triacanthos) · 85 years · Nørrebro
Someone has been keeping notes on this tree since 1941. That year a Danish gardening magazine ran a feature on beautiful trees and included a honey locust in section E of Assistens cemetery. In 1949 Jens Østergaard came to measure it for a nationwide survey of Gleditsia triacanthos in Danish gardens, published in the Dendrological Society's 1952 yearbook: twelve metres tall, standing on what the surveyor recorded as former rampart ground, clay loam, listed as site number six of only thirty-five in the whole country. In November 2019 the Society came back with a GPS and a tape. Sixteen metres, 1.18 metres round, alive and healthy.
Four metres of growth in seventy years is exactly what this species should manage, which is what makes the paper trail worth more than a plaque. The same tree, in the same spot, written up three times across eighty years by people with no reason to exaggerate.
The thorns are what to look for, and you will have to look up. Honey locust usually arms its trunk with branched spikes at chest height. This one carries only a few, sitting two and a half to three metres up, out of reach and easy to walk straight past.
Assistens opened in 1760 as a burial ground for the poor, on ground outside the city ramparts, and Hans Christian Andersen lies a few minutes' walk from here. The honey locust was rare enough in Denmark to be worth cataloguing nationally. It still is.
Hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) · 25-80 years · Frederiksberg
Every November this hornbeam gets harvested. Since 2004 parents in Frederiksberg have brought toddlers here to tie up the pacifier they have agreed to give up, and once a year the whole crop comes down so the tree can start again. Danish dendrologists list it on their national register under the name everyone else uses: Suttetræet, the pacifier tree.
That register entry is unusual for what it leaves out. Every other tree recorded in Frederiksberg Have carries a height, a girth, often a planting year. This one carries none of them. Nobody has measured it and nobody has dated it, so read any age attached to this tree as a guess rather than a measurement. It is a mature garden hornbeam. That is the whole of what is known.
Which is rather the point. Carpinus betulus is the workhorse of formal European gardens, planted by the thousand for its density and its patience under the shears, and Frederiksberg Have has been royal ground since about 1700 and a romantic landscape park since its rebuilding between 1798 and 1804. The garden's history is documented down to the decade. The tree's is not. What it has instead is twenty-two years of small plastic objects and a steady supply of three-year-olds making a decision.
Come in autumn if you want to see it fully loaded. The November harvest clears it back to bare branches.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) · 60-120 years · Nørrebro
Skyrækker, the Danish name for this species, means sky-reacher. At 15.5 metres this one does not out-top the big beeches and maples around it, but at 4.01 metres round it is the largest exotic tree the Danish Dendrological Society registered inside these cemetery walls, and the only Ailanthus they found here at all.
It also comes with an open question. The surveyors who measured it in November 2019 logged its condition as levende, svag: alive, but weak. They noted severe bark scraping low on the western side of the trunk, the kind of injury that interrupts the traffic between roots and crown. Nothing found since updates that note, so what stands behind this entry is one careful observation now about seven years old. If you go and find it changed, tell us.
No source gives its age either. Somewhere between sixty and a hundred and twenty years is an inference from girth alone, not a record.
Ailanthus altissima reached Europe from China in the eighteenth century as a fashionable exotic and is now better known for pushing up through railway ballast and cracked concrete anywhere it can get a root down. This one was planted on purpose, in a cemetery that collected rarities, and the handkerchief tree and the ginkgo a few paths away come from the same appetite. Assistens works as a public park as much as a burial ground, and that collection is a large part of why.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Hawthorn (Crataegus sp.) · Norrebro
A school and a diabetes centre were planned for this corner of Nørrebro, and the plans were paused to keep the green ground, and this hawthorn on it, intact. The register's own note records the pause as of August 2018.
What the campaigners were defending is a remnant. Nordpolen is one of the last surviving pieces of the old common, the overdrev, that lay here before Nørrebro was built across it, so the hawthorn belongs to the ground rather than to anybody's planting plan. Red Byens Træer, a local blog that has gone through this quarter tree by tree, calls it the magical white hawthorn, older than Nørrebro itself. The register puts it at 2.21 metres round and 8.5 metres tall and describes its form as twisted and stunted, which is what a hedgerow survivor looks like standing next to a planted specimen.
It is a small tree by the standards of this list and it has outlasted everything around it, which is the whole point of it. The hospital campus of De Gamles By sits on one side and Tagensvej runs on the other.
Nobody has dated it, and nobody has settled which hawthorn it is: the register files it as Crataegus sp. and leaves the species open. If you know which one it is, tell us.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Field Maple (Acer campestre) · Norrebro
The Danish Tree Register calls this the third thickest field maple currently standing in Denmark. That is the register's claim and nobody else repeats it, and the register complicates its own arithmetic in the same breath: two of the maples in the ranking, both in Dragsholm Park, look like two entries for one tree.
Rank aside, the tree is odd for its species. Acer campestre is a small thing, more often clipped into a hedge than allowed to become anything, and this one has 4.03 metres of trunk and 12 metres of height in a public park in Nørrebro, opposite Jesper Brochmands Gade and a few minutes from Assistens Cemetery.
It has had work done. Several of the larger branches have been sawn out of the crown and some of the smaller ones are dry, recorded by the surveyor who checked the position in April 2019. That reads as a tree being managed rather than a tree failing, and nothing in the record suggests otherwise.
No second source carries this maple at all, so everything above rests on one register entry. Nobody has dated it either, and we have not tried to work an age out of the girth. If you know when this part of Hans Tavsens Park was planted, tell us.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) · Vanlose
The figure in the register, 4.16 metres, is not a trunk. The surveyor counted four or five stems and put the tape around the lot of them, so this is a wide multi-stemmed hornbeam rather than a thick-trunked one, which is worth saying plainly because the number flatters it otherwise.
What it is instead is a big healthy hornbeam 16.5 metres tall, a hundred metres from Grøndal station, in a green corridor that follows the railway between Damhussøen and Borups Allé. Grøndalsparken was laid out between 1930 and 1939 to the design of the city gardener Fabricius-Hansen. Nothing in the record dates this tree to that work, so it is not dated here either.
Several stems out of one base is the ordinary shape for Carpinus betulus. It is the classic coppice and hedging tree of northern Europe, cut for centuries for tool handles and firewood because the wood is harder than oak, and it answers cutting by coming back as a cluster rather than a trunk.
Only the register carries this tree. It was recorded alive and healthy when the position was checked in November 2019, and no other source names it at all. If you know anything about its history, tell us.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Weeping Silver Lime (Tilia tomentosa 'Petiolaris') · Carlsberg
The main branches of this lime are held together with wire. The register noted the cables when it checked the tree in April 2019, which means somebody is managing a weakness in the crown rather than waiting to see, and it has not stopped the tree becoming one of the largest things in the garden: 4.77 metres round and 27.5 metres tall.
The garden is J.C. Jacobsens Have, laid out in 1848 by the landscape architect Rudolph Rothe as the private grounds of the brewer who founded Carlsberg, and planted over the years with trees he brought home from his travels. It opened to the public in 2009 and is a protected monument now. Whether this particular lime was one of his own imports is not recorded in anything we found: the Carlsberg account describes the garden and not its individual trees, so the tree itself rests on the register entry.
Tilia tomentosa 'Petiolaris' is the weeping form of the silver lime. The leaves are dark on top and white-felted underneath, hung on long stalks, so the whole crown turns pale and flickers whenever there is wind. The Danish register files it under Ungarsk Sølvlind, Hungarian silver lime, a local name for the same tree.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Field Maple (Acer campestre) · Vanlose
Copenhagen has two field maples worth crossing town for, and the register tells them apart by numbering: this one is filed as Navr 2. It is the taller of the pair and the slimmer, 3.60 metres round and 15.5 metres high, against 4.03 metres and 12 metres for the maple in Hans Tavsens Park.
It stands on its own in Grøndalsparken, facing the building at Kærholmen, and it branches from about a metre up, so what you get above head height is several heavy limbs rather than one continuing trunk. A solitary field maple is the interesting part. Acer campestre spends most of its life in Denmark as hedge material, cut back every few years and never allowed to become anything; this one was left alone long enough to turn into a tree, in a park that runs as a green strip along the railway.
The register recorded it as alive and healthy when the position was checked in November 2019, and the register is the only source that carries it. Nobody else has written it up, nobody has dated it, and no age is offered here because none can be honestly derived.
If you know when this stretch of the park was planted, tell us and we will put it in.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Fern-leaved Beech (Fagus sylvatica 'Laciniata') · Oster Anlaeg
Somebody has sawn branches off this beech and the surveyor who recorded it could not work out why. The register's note describes several oddly cut stubs on the trunk, along with a mass of branches sprouting from low down, and offers no explanation for either. Whoever did the cutting left no reason behind.
The tree is a fern-leaved beech, 4.37 metres round and 18 metres tall, standing at the northeastern gable of Statens Museum for Kunst with Øster Anlæg opening out behind it. 'Laciniata' is a form of the ordinary European beech whose leaves are cut into narrow, deeply toothed lobes, so at a glance the crown does not read as beech at all. In late October it does what every beech does and turns copper, on leaves shaped like fern fronds.
The museum garden was reopened in 2014 deliberately unfenced toward Øster Voldgade and Sølvgade, so the ground the tree stands on is public around the clock. The ticket is only for the building.
Only the register carries the tree itself. The museum and its garden are well documented; this beech is not, beyond one survey in December 2019 that measured it and wrote down the cut branches nobody could account for.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · Carlsberg
This is an eastern Mediterranean tree standing 5.80 metres round in a Copenhagen brewery garden. Platanus orientalis grows wild from the Balkans east into Iran, and this one is 22 metres tall on a single stem on the round lawn west of the honorary residence, a long way north of anywhere it would seed itself.
The garden explains the geography. J.C. Jacobsens Have was laid out in 1848 as the private grounds of the brewer who founded Carlsberg, and it was stocked over decades with trees he brought back from his travels. It opened to the public in 2009 and is a protected monument. Whether this plane was one of his own imports is not written down anywhere we could find, so the tree itself rests on the register entry that measured it in 2019 and recorded it healthy.
Low on the trunk the bark has gone lumpy and uneven, which the surveyor noted specifically. Higher up it does what planes do, shedding in plates to leave the trunk mottled cream and olive.
The leaves are the giveaway if you are comparing it with Copenhagen's London planes: the oriental plane is cut far more deeply, into narrow pointed lobes that run most of the way to the leaf stalk.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · Holmen
The surveyor who measured this beech wrote that the base is almost an elephant's foot, half a metre up the trunk. That is the register's own phrase, and it is a fair description of what root buttresses do to an old beech: the trunk stops being round and starts spreading into the ground in folds.
Above the folds it is a straightforward giant, one stem, 5.40 metres round and 19.5 metres tall, recorded healthy at the December 2018 survey. It stands by the western path of Holmens Kirkegård, about fifty metres from the northern corner.
The ground is the oldest working cemetery in Copenhagen. Holmens Kirkegård was consecrated in 1666 as the burial ground of the navy, which is why it is also called Skovkirkegården and Bådsmandskirkegården, and it is still in use. Nobody has dated the beech, so it is not being credited with the whole of that. What can be said is that it grew up in a burial ground rather than a park, which is a quieter kind of ground and usually an older one.
Only the register names the tree itself. The cemetery's history is well documented and says nothing about this beech in particular.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Japanese Pagoda Tree (Styphnolobium japonicum) · Frederiksberg
The Japanese pagoda tree is not Japanese. Styphnolobium japonicum comes from China and was named from cultivated trees in Japan, where Europeans first saw it, which is the sort of accident that sticks for three centuries.
This one stands on a street corner in Frederiksberg, immediately east of Sankt Thomas Kirke where Rolighedsvej meets L.I. Brandes Allé, 3.15 metres round and 12 metres tall. It has had a hard time of it. A few years before the 2022 survey somebody cut it back heavily, and it carries large bark wounds on its south and east sides over the lowest two metres of trunk. The register recorded it alive.
It is worth knowing what the species does in late summer, because almost nothing else does it. The pagoda tree flowers in August and September, cream-coloured and in loose sprays, at the point in the year when every other flowering tree in the city has long finished. Whether this pruned and wounded specimen still puts on a full show is not something any source records.
No source but the register carries this tree at all. If you pass it and can say how the crown is doing, that would be worth more to us than another measurement.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · Frederiksberg
Everything about this tree is settled except whether you can walk up to it. The register has it at 3.90 metres round and 20 metres tall on a single stem, position checked in September 2016, described as standing in the park at Allégade 17 in Frederiksberg. What no source we found will confirm is which plot that is. Allégade has a public rose garden, Rosenhaven, entered from number 20, and it also has private ground behind it, and our sources do not say which side of that line this wingnut is on. Go expecting to look rather than to stand underneath, and tell us what you find.
It is worth the uncertainty. Pterocarya fraxinifolia is the Caucasian wingnut, a tree of the wet forests between the Black Sea and northern Iran, with long pinnate leaves like an ash and chains of small winged nuts that hang down through the summer. It suckers hard, so old ones are often surrounded by their own offspring.
No age is offered here. Nothing we could verify dates it, and nothing in the record supports deriving one, so the field stays empty rather than being filled with a guess. If you know when it went in, tell us. Only the register carries the tree.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · Frederiksberg
The zelkova a few hundred metres away measures more, but that figure counts four stems grown together. This is one trunk, 6.71 metres round, the thickest single trunk the register records in Landbohøjskolens Have, and it carries a crown 25.7 metres up behind the old auditorium VII.
The garden was inaugurated in 1858 for the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural College, and the university's own history of the place says plainly that trees planted then are still standing, more than 150 years on. It names zelkovas, a golden weeping ash, collections of ash and chestnut. It does not name this plane, so the tree itself rests on the register, which checked its position in 2011 and recorded it healthy and single-stemmed.
Platanus x acerifolia is a hybrid of the oriental plane and the American one, and it became the standard street tree of industrial Europe because it tolerates polluted air and shrugs off root compaction. Most of the ones you meet are pollarded to a fist of knuckles. This one was left to grow, which is why it is worth the walk: a plane allowed to become what it wanted to become.
The garden is free and open, ten minutes on foot from Fasanvej metro.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Saw-leaf Zelkova (Zelkova serrata) · Frederiksberg
This is not one tree with four stems. It is four trees that grew into each other. The university's history of Landbohøjskolens Have describes the zelkovas along Bülowsvej whose separate trunks have fused into a single crown, the result of a nineteenth-century habit of dropping several saplings into one planting hole, and the register's entry for this tree records exactly that: four stems, measured together at 7.55 metres, under 17 metres of shared canopy.
So the girth is a group figure, not a trunk. What it describes is better than a trunk anyway, because the four have knitted into one another at the base and the crown above them behaves as one tree.
Zelkova serrata is an elm relative from Japan, Korea and eastern China, with fine-toothed leaves and smooth grey bark that flakes to orange as it ages. The garden's own history counts its zelkovas among the old trees here, which is more than it says about most of what grows in it.
One caution from the survey in June 2022: there is fungal infection in the southeastern stem. On a tree made of four stems that is a slower problem than it would be on one, but it is worth looking at when you stand there.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · Osterbro
A tree standing on the pavement in Østerbro has grown as tall as the five-storey blocks around it. The Danish landscape architects' association wrote a whole article about this plane, Mere end et træ, and it makes two claims worth repeating: that this may be one of the oldest surviving plane trees in Denmark, and that nobody knows how old it actually is.
The second part is the honest part. The article says plainly that its age is not established, and that it is not even clear how old a London plane can become in this climate, so there is nothing here to date. What is established is the size: 5.78 metres round, 27 metres tall, with the crown reaching over the roof of the apartment building beside it, recorded healthy by the register in 2019.
It is also protected. The Rosenvænget local plan names it as a valuable tree, which in a neighbourhood of this density means the pavement it stands on cannot simply be rearranged around it.
You can stand under it at any hour, which is rare on this list. It is on the public pavement outside Rosenvængets Allé 30, on the corner of Såbyesvej, and if you happen to know when it was planted, that is the one thing missing.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Lanceleaf Cottonwood (Populus acuminata) · Bispebjerg
The register is not sure what this tree is, and puts question marks in its own name field to say so. It files it as Populus acuminata, a North American hybrid cottonwood with no established Danish name, and the surveyor noted that the leaves within this group of three vary in how long they are against how wide, which is exactly the measurement the identification turns on.
So here it is, published with the doubt attached. It is 2.36 metres round and 20 metres tall, the northernmost of the three, standing on the lawn between the northern and southern chapels of Bispebjerg Kirkegård. If you know poplars and you can settle it, that is a correction we would be glad to make.
The cemetery is worth the trip on its own account. Copenhagen laid it out with avenues of poplar, pine, ash, hornbeam and Japanese cherry, so the planting is not a graveyard's usual scatter of yew and lime but something closer to an arboretum with graves in it. The city's own description of the place leads with the trees.
Only the register names this individual. Everything above about the tree itself comes from one survey in July 2017.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Southern Catalpa (Catalpa bignonioides) · Frederiksberg
The catalpa is among the last trees in any garden to come into leaf, so for several weeks each spring it stands there looking dead while everything around it is green. Then it produces leaves the size of a hand, white foxglove-shaped flowers in midsummer, and long thin seed pods that hang on through the winter.
This one is just inside the entrance of Haveselskabets Have, the Danish Horticultural Society's garden in Frederiksberg, 2.17 metres round and 12 metres tall. It forks about two metres up and continues as a pair of limbs, which is the ordinary way a southern catalpa builds itself: wide rather than high, more umbrella than column.
The garden is free and open all year, roughly from six in the morning until somewhere between five and ten at night depending on the season, which makes this one of the easier trees on this list to get to. It is a couple of minutes from Frederiksberg Allé metro.
Only the register names the tree. The garden is well documented and this catalpa is not, beyond a survey in September 2023 that measured it and recorded it healthy. Nobody has dated it, and no age is guessed at here.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) · Carlsberg
The flowers this tree is named for open in June, high in the crown, and most people standing under it never see one. Liriodendron tulipifera carries greenish orange blooms shaped like tulips, and it carries them at the top, twenty metres up in this case, which is why the ground under an old tulip tree in summer is often the only place you find them.
This is one of the tallest trees in J.C. Jacobsens Have at 26.5 metres, on a single stem 3.92 metres round, standing on the western lawn toward the northwest. The garden was the private ground of the brewer who founded Carlsberg, laid out in 1848 and stocked with trees he brought back from his travels; it opened to the public in 2009. The Carlsberg account tells that story about the garden and not about this tree, so the tulip tree itself rests on the register survey of April 2019, which recorded it healthy.
The leaf is the other oddity. It looks like a maple leaf with the tip cut off square, unmistakable once you have seen one, and in late October the whole crown of them turns clear yellow.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) · Frederiksberg
Something took a large piece of bark off the south side of this tree and it carried on growing. The wound is the first thing the register records about it after the measurements, and the measurements are 2.92 metres round and 21.5 metres tall, on one stem, in the southeastern corner of Lindevangsparken.
That height is the interesting part. Robinia pseudoacacia is an American tree, from the Appalachians, planted across Europe for centuries because its timber resists rot in the ground, and in a park it often ends up as a leaning, suckering, many-stemmed thing. This one went straight up instead and kept a single trunk while doing it.
The giveaways are all at eye level and above: bark furrowed into deep ropes, pairs of short spines at the base of the twigs, leaves divided into rows of small oval leaflets, and hanging clusters of white pea flowers in early summer that smell strongly enough to find the tree by.
Only the register carries it. The position and condition were checked in June 2023, the tree was recorded alive, and nobody has dated it, so no age is offered here. Lindevangsparken is free and open, five to ten minutes from Peter Bangs Vej metro.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Japanese Flowering Cherry 'Accolade' (Prunus 'Accolade') · ~30 years · Bispebjerg
Around 150,000 people were expected to walk this avenue during a fortnight of bloom in 2026. It is a cemetery path, and for two weeks a year it is one of the busiest places in Copenhagen.
Be clear about what it is. The cherries went in in 1992, about 43 of them, replacing an avenue of elms that Dutch elm disease had killed. So this is not an ancient tree and it is not really a tree at all: it is an avenue, and the avenue is the destination. You walk the length of it under a continuous roof of pink, which is a different thing from standing in front of one old trunk, and it is why the entry exists.
The cultivar is Prunus 'Accolade', an ornamental that flowers hard and sets no useful fruit. The register puts the bloom in the second half of April, the press usually reports it in the middle of the month, and the truth is that it moves with the year and lasts around two weeks.
Bispebjerg Kirkegård is a working burial ground with people being buried in it. On peak weekends the avenue is crowded to the point of queueing, so early mornings and weekdays are the way to walk it.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Caucasian Oak (Quercus macranthera) · Valby
Measure this oak at chest height, where the tape is supposed to go, and you get about four metres. Measure it where the trunk is clean and you get 2.98. Both figures sit in the same register entry and neither is wrong.
The reason is that it is a grafted tree. A Caucasian oak has been grafted onto a pedunculate oak rootstock, and low on the trunk it carries pads of epicormic growth, the knobbly clusters of small shoots that a graft often throws, which swell the circumference exactly where the measurement is meant to be taken. The 2.98 metres used here is the honest clear-trunk figure. What you will see is thicker than that and lumpy with it.
Above the join it is straightforwardly a Quercus macranthera, an oak from the Caucasus and northern Iran with large, deeply lobed leaves and downy young shoots, standing 20.5 metres tall in section I of Vestre Kirkegård.
Somebody besides the register thought it worth pointing at: Wonderful Copenhagen's own map of the cemetery marks it as tree number two on a walking guide to the place. The cemetery is free and open daily, from seven in the morning until seven in winter and ten in summer.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Service Tree (Sorbus domestica) · Carlsberg
The register's surveyors deal in centimetres and growth forms. For this one the note says simply that it is a large and beautiful tree, and stops there.
The reason for the lapse is probably the species. Sorbus domestica, the service tree, is a genuine rarity in Denmark: a wild relative of the rowan that grows slowly, fruits sparsely, and turns up in old collections rather than in parks. The fruit is the tell, small and shaped like a miniature pear or apple rather than the rowan's cluster of red berries, and it was once gathered and left to go soft before anybody would eat it.
This one is 3.18 metres round and 16 metres tall on a single stem, standing 40 metres due north of the fountain in J.C. Jacobsens Have, and the register recorded it healthy in April 2019. The garden was laid out in 1848 as the private grounds of the brewer who founded Carlsberg and filled over the years with trees he brought home from his travels; it opened to the public in 2009. Whether this service tree was one of his is not recorded, so the tree itself stands on the register entry alone.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Hungarian Oak (Quercus frainetto) · Bispebjerg
This oak is a long way from home. Quercus frainetto grows wild in southeastern Europe, in the Balkans and down into southern Italy, so nothing about it is a Danish survivor: somebody planted it here on purpose, and it has done well enough to reach 4.19 metres round and 23.5 metres tall.
The register describes it as free-standing and full-crowned, which in a cemetery means it has had the space and the light to build the shape it wanted, without competition on any side. It stands about 90 metres northwest of Nordre Kapel at Bispebjerg Kirkegård, where the city planted whole avenues of poplar, pine, ash, hornbeam and Japanese cherry and ended up with something closer to a collection than a churchyard.
The leaves settle the identification on the spot. Hungarian oak carries the largest leaves of any European oak, deeply cut into many lobes and crowded toward the ends of the shoots, so the crown looks heavier and darker than a Danish oak's from a distance.
Only the register names the tree. The city's cemetery page confirms the avenues and the public access and says nothing about this individual, and nobody has dated it, so no age is offered here.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · Frederiksberg
Thirty-one and a half metres is a great deal of height for a pedunculate oak, and this one in Søndermarken carries it on a single trunk 5.40 metres round at chest height. Those are the Danish Tree Register's figures, taken by the dendrologist Hans Erik Lund, who stood here on 5 September 2016, measured it, fixed its position and recorded it as alive.
Put it beside its neighbour and the numbers start to mean something. The oak we map across the road in Frederiksberg Have is 28.8 metres tall and 4.95 metres round. This one is taller and thicker, and it has no name, no legend and no plaque. The register calls it remarkable at municipal level and leaves it there.
That is the whole of its paperwork, and it is worth being plain about what it does not say. Nobody has dated this oak. There is no planting record in the register entry and no age estimate, and a park full of oaks gives no easy clue about which generation this one belongs to. So the honest answer to how old it is: we do not know, and if you do, tell us.
The register's last visit was Lund's, in 2016. Somebody photographed something within thirty metres of the pin at the end of 2025, which in a park of many oaks proves less than it sounds. If you stand under it, tell us it is still there.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · Charlottenlund (Gentofte)
This oak has a street junction to itself. It stands on a small public traffic island where Hegelsvej meets Krathusvej in Charlottenlund, a few minutes from the S-train, with the traffic passing on both sides.
It is not a street tree in the ordinary sense. The Danish Tree Register measured the trunk at 5.23 metres round at chest height and 1.66 metres across, one single stem, and recorded the tree as living and healthy. For comparison, the oak we map in Frederiksberg Have is 4.95 metres round. The register rates this one remarkable at municipal level, and nobody gave it a name.
It has not come through untouched. The register records that a large limb was removed on the south side, which is the kind of scar a tree collects when it stands beside a road for long enough. When that happened, and why, the entry does not say.
Two honest gaps. Nobody has recorded an age for this oak, and there is no planting date to work one out from. And the last time anyone from the register stood here was June 2013, when Hans Erik Lund confirmed the position and took the photograph. We have found no dated sighting since. A tree this size on a junction this visible is hard to miss, so if you pass it, tell us it is still standing, and if you know how old it is, tell us that too.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · Nørrebro
What the Danish Tree Register admires about this oak is not its size but its shape. The entry calls the crown beautiful and symmetrical, which is an unusual thing for a register to bother writing down, and adds that the trunk carries a neat burl.
The size is respectable all the same: 4.62 metres round and 24.5 metres tall, a single pedunculate oak in Hans Tavsens Park in Nørrebro, on the side of the park that faces Assistens Kirkegård. The register recorded it as living and healthy in April 2019 and rates it remarkable at municipal level. Someone photographed a tree within thirty metres of it in November 2024.
The park holds a second tree on this map, a field maple about sixty metres away that the same register ranks among the thickest of its species in Denmark. Two different trees and two different species, so you can do both in the time it takes to cross the grass, and then carry on into Assistens next door, where Copenhagen's cemetery trees are the subject of a whole walk of their own.
What nobody has written down is how old the oak is. There is no planting date in the register and no estimate. If you know the park's history well enough to say when this tree went in, tell us.
Go in winter if you want to see the symmetry the register describes, when the crown is bare and the whole frame of it shows.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · Indre By (Latin Quarter)
This plane tree was already famous enough in 1995 to go into a book called Berømte danske træer, famous Danish trees. Its author, Qvistorff, measured the trunk at 3.90 metres round. When the Danish Tree Register taped it again in December 2013 it had reached 4.19 metres, which is what eighteen more years of steady growth on a healthy plane looks like.
It stands in the open public square of Gråbrødre Torv, Greyfriars Square, in the old Latin Quarter, about seven minutes' walk from Nørreport and close to Strøget. The tree is 21 metres tall, recorded as living and healthy, and rated remarkable at regional level rather than merely municipal. The register keeps two entries for it, an older one carrying the 1995 figures and a newer one with the 2013 measurement, and they describe the same trunk.
That makes it a tree you can watch grow on paper. Most old trees are measured once, if ever. This one has a reading from a book of famous trees and a second from a dendrologist with a tape eighteen years later, and the difference between them is thirty centimetres of trunk added in a square in the middle of the city.
Nobody has recorded when it was planted, and the square's own long history is not a date for the tree. If you know when this plane went in, tell us.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Oriental Beech (Fagus orientalis) · Østerbro
Nearly every beech you pass in a Danish wood is the common European kind. This one is not. It is an oriental beech, the beech of the Caucasus and northern Turkey, uncommon in Denmark, and it stands in Fælledparken, Copenhagen's big public park in Østerbro, just east of the Soppesøen pond.
It is a large one. The Danish Tree Register measured it at 3.21 metres round and 25 metres tall, recorded it as living and healthy in August 2013, and rates it remarkable at municipal level. The register places it fifty metres north of the corner where Frederik V's Vej meets Edel Sauntes Allé, which in a park this size is the kind of direction you are glad to have.
Telling it from a common beech takes a moment's attention. The oriental species generally has longer leaves with more pairs of veins, but from a few steps away the two look much alike, which is how an uncommon tree can stand in one of the city's busiest parks without most people noticing it.
Two things we do not know. Nobody has recorded its age or when it was planted. And the most recent dated photograph anywhere near it is from March 2021, so its life since then rests on the register's 2013 visit and the absence of any news of a loss. If you find it, a dated photograph would settle the second question, and if you know its planting history, tell us the first.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) · Vesterbro (Vestre Kirkegård)
Most northern red oaks grow up. This one grew out. At 14 metres it is short for its species, and the Danish Tree Register, describing it in April 2019, gives the reason in a few words: it stands free, with a large, broad crown. With nothing crowding it, the tree spent its energy sideways, over a lawn of graves in Vestre Kirkegård.
The trunk is 3.44 metres round, which is a good girth for a red oak, a North American species that Danish parks and cemeteries planted for its speed and its autumn colour. The register recorded it as living and healthy, rated it remarkable at municipal level, and noted some water shoots, the thin sprouts an oak throws up from its trunk and limbs.
It is not a rarity and it does not pretend to be. It is a plain, generous tree in Copenhagen's largest cemetery, at the south end of the lawn east of the maintenance yard, and it earns the walk in October, when red oaks turn the colour they are named for. The Caucasian oak we map in the same cemetery makes a pair of it: two oaks from two different continents, both a long way from home.
Nobody has recorded its age. Nobody has confirmed it standing since the register's 2019 visit either, so if you go, tell us it is still there, and if you know when it was planted, tell us that too.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Weeping Beech (Fagus sylvatica 'Pendula') · Østerbro (Garnisons Kirkegård)
This beech is eating a fence. Somebody once put an iron railing round a grave in Garnisons Kirkegård, the tree grew beside it, and over the years the trunk has closed round part of the ironwork and taken it in. The Danish Tree Register records it in plain words, and the photograph that goes with the entry shows the railing disappearing into the bark.
It is a weeping beech, the cultivated form whose branches fall to the ground in a curtain, and like most weeping beeches it is a grafted tree: a weeping crown set on an ordinary beech rootstock. You can see the join in the measurements. Above the graft, at about a metre, the trunk is 3.22 metres round. Below it, the rootstock is only 2.48. The crown stands 13 metres tall, and the register recorded the whole tree as living and healthy in December 2018 and rates it remarkable at municipal level. Someone photographed a tree within thirty metres of it in August 2025.
Garnisons Kirkegård is the old garrison cemetery of Østerbro, a few minutes' walk from Østerport, and the register's directions are precise: 45 metres out, in line with the south gable of the embassy beside it.
If you have already met the weeping beech we map in Assistens Kirkegård, this is its counterpart across town, slightly thinner and stranger. Nobody has recorded when this one was planted. If you know its age, tell us.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
A day trip away
Lyngby Aamose, 11 km north-west
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 400-800 years · Lyngby Aamose, Kongens Lyngby
Denmark protected this oak by law in 1956 and still cannot date it within four centuries. The Danish Dendrological Society's register gives 800 years as a maximum rather than an estimate, which is a different kind of number: the most the tree could be, not the best guess at what it is. So the range here runs from 400 to 800 years, and nobody has narrowed it.
What has been measured: 6.05 metres round, 1.93 metres through, alive at the last field report. A storm in 2013 broke off a large branch and the tree carried on without further loss.
The name belongs to Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, the German poet who came to Denmark in 1751 at the invitation of Frederik V, stayed twenty years, and spent his summers at Gramlille on Lyngby Hovedgade, a short walk from here. Nothing is recorded about what he did under this particular tree. It carries his name the way a street does, by association with the neighbourhood he lived in. It has also been called Monrads Eg, after D.G. Monrad. A memorial plaque went up in 1984.
The oak stands right beside Prinsessestien, a public path through Lyngby Aamose in the Molleaadalen valley, about 12 km northwest of Copenhagen and a quarter of an hour on foot from Sorgenfri station.
Photo: Finn Årup Nielsen (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Jaegersborg Dyrehave, 12 km north
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 800 years · Klampenborg
Ten metres and 42 centimetres around, and empty in the middle. Skovfogedegen has lost its entire heartwood to rot, which an oak can survive: water and sugars travel in the thin growing layer just under the bark, so a hollow trunk is a shell that still works. Three dated Danish sources put the tree here since around the year 1200: the national encyclopedia, the historical-sites database Historisk Atlas, and a 2025 feature in the newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad. That makes it roughly 800 years old, and by a wide margin the oldest and thickest tree on this list. One untraced web page gives 500 years instead. Nothing stands behind it, and the three that agree are dated and named.
The hollow has been put to use. Johan Georg Weissler, a Catholic forest ranger who died in 1854, used the cavity as a private prayer chamber in the early 1800s, and skovfoged, forest ranger, is where the tree's name comes from. At other times the hole held peat.
The Danish Dendrological Society measured it at 12.9 metres tall and logged it living but weak in 2010. A photograph taken in March 2025 shows the same hollow trunk still standing. It is not a city tree: it grows beside the road Strandvejen at the edge of Jaegersborg Dyrehave, 11 km north of Copenhagen, opposite Bellevue Strand.
Photo: Niels Orbesen (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 300 years · Jaegersborg Dyrehave (the royal deer park)
This oak was dying, and treasure hunters saved it by accident. Generations of digging around its roots broke up the packed soil and let air back in, which is what the Danish Dendrological Society's register credits with its recovery. Nobody was trying to help the tree. They were looking for a chest of money.
The name, Englaenderegen, the Englishman's oak, comes from the British siege of Copenhagen in 1807. Two soldiers, tired of service, are said to have stolen their regiment's pay chest and buried it beside a freestanding oak northeast of the Hermitage. Neither came back for it, and one confessed on his deathbed to a priest. Searches followed for over a hundred years, including one made at the request of Queen Victoria, and nothing has ever been found. The chest is legend. The holes were real, and they are the part that mattered.
The register measures the trunk at 5.46 metres round and 1.74 metres through, and dates it at 240 to 360 years using a growth formula applied to 1995 measurements, which puts it at roughly 270 to 390 now. It stands by the pond Magasindammen in Jaegersborg Dyrehave, the royal deer park north of Copenhagen, and the Nature Agency marks the site wheelchair accessible. Getting there is the long part: 35 to 40 minutes on foot from Klampenborg station, past Eremitageslottet.
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 350-550 years · Jaegersborg Dyrehave
Measured at chest height in March 2017, this oak came to 8.90 metres round. The register's headline figure of 9.65 metres is taken at a different height on the same trunk, which is how one tree ends up carrying two sizes. The lower number is the one to use when comparing it with anything else.
Either way it is one of the giants of Jægersborg Dyrehave, the royal deer park north of the city, where red, sika and fallow deer still have the run of eleven square kilometres. The oak grows on more than one stem and its base steps outward near the ground; a Danish hiking blog that walked the park's named oaks describes that base as making the tree climbable, which is the sort of detail only somebody who put their hands on it would write down.
Nobody has cored it, so the age is arithmetic rather than a record. A girth of 8.90 metres gives a trunk about 2.8 metres across, and standard growth rates for an oak grown in the open put that somewhere between roughly 350 and 550 years. The band is wide because the method is.
The name Trepileegen translates as the Three-Willow Oak. What the three willows were, or whether they ever stood here, is not explained by any source we found.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 350-550 years · Jaegersborg Dyrehave
The hiker who went out to find this oak came back unsure of the find. That account of Dyrehaven's named giants lists Kuppelegen and admits it could not be confidently separated from Stokkerupegen, a similar oak standing in the same group. So take the position from the register, which checked it in 2008, and take the walking account as support rather than proof.
Kuppel means dome, and the name describes the crown: wide and low rather than reaching. At 17.2 metres this is the shortest of the park's big named oaks and among the widest, 8.63 metres round, standing about a hundred metres from Trepileegen.
The age is a calculation, not a record. A trunk 8.63 metres in circumference is roughly 2.75 metres across, and growth rates for oaks grown in the open put that between about 350 and 550 years. Call it old and leave the century open.
Go slowly at the end of the walk. These oaks stand in a cluster and more than one of them is enormous, which is exactly how the hiker came unstuck. The park is free and open every day, and it is a long way in: from Klampenborg station the walk is 30 to 40 minutes, with free-roaming red, sika and fallow deer for company most of it.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 325-550 years · Jaegersborg Dyrehave
This oak is called the Wart Oak, for the wart-like burrs on its bark, and the hiker who walked out to look at them recorded that the tree did not visibly show any.
It is worth the walk regardless. Vorteegen stands on a single stem out on the open grassland in Jægersborg Dyrehave, 8.48 metres round and 16.5 metres tall by the register's own legend, measured in March 2017. The headline figures on the same entry, 8.41 metres and 16.8 metres, are the earlier survey: between the two the girth gained seven centimetres and the recorded height lost thirty, which is the ordinary wobble of measuring a living tree from the ground.
Nobody has cored it and no planting record exists, so the age is derived. A circumference of 8.48 metres is a trunk roughly 2.7 metres across, and standard growth rates for an oak grown in the open put that between about 325 and 550 years.
The open ground is why it looks like this. A tree with nothing crowding it spends its growth sideways, so the trunk is enormous and the crown is only as high as it needs to be. The deer graze around it, free-roaming red, sika and fallow, and the park is free and open every day.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 325-525 years · Jaegersborg Dyrehave
This oak carries three names and the most interesting one is unexplained. Beside its formal entry the register lists Den Brændte Eg, the Burnt Oak, and Raunkiærs Eg, after Christen C. Raunkiær, the Danish botanist who classified plants by life-form and who studied Dyrehaven's ancient oaks. What burned, and when, no source we found says.
The measurements are dated and unusually solid: 8.20 metres round and 21 metres tall, recorded in 1998 and published in N.E. Holten's survey of the thirty thickest oaks in Denmark in the Danish Dendrological Yearbook. Most trees on this list rest on a register field. This one rests on a printed survey, and it has had nearly thirty growing seasons since, so the trunk is wider now than the number says.
The age is derived rather than recorded, as everywhere in this park. A girth of 8.20 metres gives a trunk about 2.6 metres across, which standard growth rates for an open-grown oak put between roughly 325 and 525 years as of that 1998 measurement.
It grows on one stem between Dalvej and Chausseen, taller than most of the park's fat old oaks and not much thinner. The deer go where they like and the park is free, open daily.
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 225-375 years · Jaegersborg Dyrehave
The crown of this oak is lopsided. The surveyor recorded it as strongly asymmetric, squeezed flat on the north side and full on the south, which is what happens to a tree that spent its life with something crowding it from one direction.
It is also the junior of Dyrehaven's named oaks on this list. At 5.80 metres round it is nearly three metres slimmer than Trepileegen, and the arithmetic reflects that: a trunk of about 1.85 metres across, at the growth rates an open-grown oak manages, works out at somewhere between roughly 225 and 375 years. That is derived from the girth rather than measured on the tree, and it still makes this oak older than almost anything standing in central Copenhagen.
Fortunegen takes its name from Fortunporten, one of the deer park's old gates, and it stands east of the Fortunporthuset gatehouse just north of Fortunvej. That corner of the park has its own station: Jægersborg on the Nærumbanen is ten to fifteen minutes away on foot, where the other oaks here mean a walk of half an hour or more from Klampenborg.
Only the register carries this one. The walking account that names the park's other giants does not mention it at all.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund