What is the oldest tree in Dublin?

Very likely a yew in the private garden of the Old Glebe in Newcastle, estimated at 500 to 700 years old. It only opens to the public in May, June and mid-August.

Are Dublin's ancient trees free to visit?

Eight of the ten are free at any time. Áras an Uachtaráin's sequoia requires a free guided tour booked on the day, and the Old Glebe's yew only opens for a few weeks a year.

Why is there a tree eating a bench in Dublin?

A London plane at King's Inns grew directly against a cast iron bench roughly a century ago and never stopped. Its bark has since swallowed the seat's arms and back, earning it the name the Hungry Tree.

Why do so many of Dublin's oldest trees grow on former private estates?

Farmleigh, St Anne's Park and the National Botanic Gardens were all once private demesnes, several of them Guinness family property, bought by the state or Dublin Corporation over the 20th century and opened to everyone. Their original planting schemes survived the handover.

Ireland

Ancient Trees in Dublin

Dublin's remarkable trees rarely come from grand planned woodland the way London's or Madrid's do. They arrive by accident and by institution instead: a bench a plane tree slowly ate, a sequoia a visiting queen planted as a courtesy, two Georgian college squares, a dead tree carved into wildlife rather than felled, and a scattering of Guinness family estates now open to everyone. Nine of these ten cost nothing to visit, though one keeps its gate locked for all but ten weeks a year.

Photo: Declan Maher, via Geograph Britain and Ireland / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Hungry Tree

London Plane (Platanus x hispanica) · 100 years · Constitution Hill, Dublin 7

A cast iron bench has been disappearing into this tree for decades, and the tree is winning. Planted a little over a century ago inside the south gate of King's Inns, Ireland's school of law since 1541, the plane grew directly against a Victorian bench and simply kept going. Bark now spills over the seat's arms and back like dough left to rise. Nobody planned it as art: an early photographer noticed the effect and gave it a name that stuck. It has since appeared on guidebook covers and in Robert Ballagh's 1981 book Dublin, turning what the Tree Council of Ireland itself calls an otherwise unremarkable specimen into one of the city's most photographed trees. The tree is younger than almost everything around it. King's Inns has trained Irish barristers since the reign of Henry VIII, while the plane itself was likely seeded sometime between 1900 and 1940. The grounds are free and open during daylight hours, reached through an archway from Henrietta Street. Resist the urge to sit on what remains of the bench.

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Queen Victoria's Sequoia

Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · 165 years · Phoenix Park

A California redwood has been growing on Irish presidential land since a queen put it there. During her 1861 visit to Dublin, Queen Victoria planted a young giant sequoia in the grounds of what was then the Viceregal Lodge, now Áras an Uachtaráin, home to the President of Ireland. The tree is still alive. Seed of the species had only reached Britain from California in 1853, which makes this one of the earliest giant sequoias planted anywhere in Europe. It started a habit rather than a one-off gesture: visiting heads of state since, including Charles de Gaulle, John F Kennedy, Pope John Paul II, Queen Elizabeth II and Barack Obama, have each planted their own tree in the grounds, so Victoria's sequoia now stands among a small forest of political arrivals rather than alone. In its native Sierra Nevada the species can live three thousand years. At around a hundred and sixty five, hers has barely started. The gardens run free guided tours from June to October, and the house itself on Saturdays year round, tickets issued on the day from the Phoenix Park Visitor Centre.

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Dean's Tree

European Yew (Taxus baccata) · 600 years · Newcastle-Lyons, West Dublin

Local tradition puts this yew at over seven hundred years old. A more cautious estimate, based on girth alone, still lands at over five hundred. Either figure makes it older than the house whose garden it now shares, built in 1710, and very likely the oldest living thing in County Dublin. Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, is said to have sat beneath it while writing and while courting Esther Vanhomrigh, the Vanessa of his poems, who lived nearby in Celbridge. Nobody can confirm the story, and old trees near famous writers tend to collect this kind of legend whether or not it happened, so take the Swift connection as folklore worth repeating rather than a documented fact. What is certain is the tree itself: a girth of five metres, split with age, still green, standing in a corner of a garden ringed with benches for visitors to sit exactly where Swift supposedly did. The Old Glebe is a private home and only opens to the public on set dates each year, under Ireland's Section 482 scheme for historic houses: all of May, all of June, and nine days in mid-August, 10am to 2pm. Check the dates before making the trip.

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Addison's Walk

European Yew (Taxus baccata) · 280 years · Glasnevin

A double row of yews in Ireland's national botanic garden may predate the garden itself by roughly sixty years. Thomas Tickell, a minor poet and friend of the essayist Joseph Addison, lived on this land from 1736 until his death in 1740, and is said to have planted this avenue in Addison's memory. The Dublin Society did not acquire the site to found the gardens until 1795, more than fifty years after Tickell died, a gap none of the surviving accounts explain, so treat the 1730s planting date as informed tradition rather than settled fact. What survives is real regardless of who is right: a dark, formal walk of clipped yew running through a garden otherwise built for scientific display rather than sentiment, doing exactly what a memorial avenue is supposed to do, nearly three centuries on. Whether Joseph Addison ever actually visited Glasnevin is a question the garden's own historians admit they cannot answer, but his name has outlasted the argument regardless. The National Botanic Gardens are free to enter and open every day of the year except Christmas Day.

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The Provost's Plane

London Plane (Platanus x hispanica) · 220 years · Trinity College, Dublin 2

Trinity College's own estates team cannot quite agree on how old their most impressive tree is. One internal account points to an image of it from 1760; another puts its planting in the early 1800s, documented on the college's 1892 tree map, and its age at around two hundred years. Either way, it has been rooted at the corner of Grafton and Nassau Street since before Dublin had trams, and that turned out to matter. When the city's first tram line opened along Nassau Street in 1872, and again a century later when the Luas arrived, the plane needed pruning on a schedule built around a transport timetable, including nighttime work between midnight and half past three so services would not be disrupted. It now stands 31 metres tall with a canopy spreading nearly 30 metres, and a girth of 4.64 metres that took two centuries to grow. It shades a corner of the Provost's private garden behind a high wall, and most of the shoppers on Grafton Street a few metres away have no idea it is there.

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The Champion Planes of New Square

London Plane (Platanus x hispanica) · 190 years · Trinity College, Dublin 2

Two plane trees in New Square have outgrown almost everything else on Trinity's campus, and both went in around 1834, when the college was rebuilding this quadrangle. The larger of the pair has a girth over five metres, the widest trunk of any tree on college grounds by Trinity's own count. Students eating lunch on the grass beneath them are sitting under trees planted when Daniel O'Connell was a sitting MP at Westminster, decades before the Easter Rising and a full century before the Irish Free State existed. Trinity's own tree survey lists this pair among the oldest specimens left on the main campus, most of the older generation having since died or been felled, including a celebrated pair of Oregon maples in Library Square that came down between 2008 and shortly after, one suddenly and one to fungal disease. New Square sits behind the Museum Building, a short walk from the queue for the Book of Kells, and unlike that queue, it costs nothing and never has one.

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The Sculpted CypressSculpted deadwood

Monterey Cypress (Cupressus macrocarpa) · 200 years · Raheny / Clontarf

When this two hundred year old Monterey cypress finally died, St Anne's Park did not remove it. Instead, over three years starting in 2015, UK chainsaw artist Tommy Craggs carved its dead trunk into a vertical menagerie: an octopus wrapped around the base, birds and small mammals climbing toward a swan perched at the very top, all modelled on animals found in the park itself and on the sandbars of nearby Bull Island. The final three metres were finished in June 2018. It stands at the park's northeast corner, near where Watermill Road meets Clontarf Road, a part of the grounds most visitors miss on their way to the rose garden. The tree was already ornamental once, planted as one of the wind-breaking evergreens Lord Ardilaun favoured when he developed the St Anne's estate in the late 19th century. Dead wood usually gets cleared. This piece got a second life as public art instead, oiled and left to weather outdoors like anything else in the park. Entry to St Anne's Park is free, at any hour.

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The Holm Oak Avenue

Holm Oak (Quercus ilex) · 155 years · Raheny / Clontarf

Lord Ardilaun planted a windbreak in the 1870s that is still doing its job a century and a half later. Sixty seven holm oaks, evergreen and Mediterranean, line the main avenue and old estate boundaries of St Anne's Park, chosen because Dublin Bay's cold easterly winds off Bull Island would otherwise strip anything deciduous bare for half the year. Arthur Guinness, first Baron Ardilaun, inherited the estate in 1868 and spent much of his fortune turning it into a private demesne with formal gardens and grand tree-lined approaches, only for Dublin Corporation to buy the whole estate from his family in 1939 and open it to everyone. The oaks never got the memo that they were meant to shelter a private house: they shelter dog walkers, parkrunners and a Saturday market instead. Unlike most street trees, a holm oak keeps its dark, leathery leaves through the Irish winter, so the avenue looks essentially the same in January as it does in July, a rare piece of consistency in a park that changes with every season around it.

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The Great Sycamore of Farmleigh

Sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) · 220 years · Castleknock, Phoenix Park

The oldest tree on the Farmleigh estate predates the Guinness family who made the place famous by about a century. This sycamore, standing at the edge of what is still called the donkey field, is estimated at over 220 years old, meaning it was already mature when Edward Cecil Guinness bought Farmleigh in 1873 and began rebuilding the house around it. Everything else here, the cedars, the sequoias, the Thuja avenue Guinness planted along the main approach, arrived later as part of his deliberate planting scheme. The sycamore did not: it was simply already there, a survivor of whatever farmland stood on this ground before Farmleigh existed as a name. Today the house serves as the Irish state's official guesthouse for visiting dignitaries, but the 78 acres of grounds around it are free to the public every day, a rare arrangement for a working state property. Farmleigh's own visitor material points to this tree specifically as the oldest thing growing on the estate. No independent survey has verified that figure beyond the estate's own long-standing estimate, so it is presented here as tradition rather than a laboratory result.

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The Oak Avenue of Corkagh

Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 210 years · Clondalkin

An avenue of oaks in Corkagh Park once led somewhere: to a country house that no longer exists. Oak Avenue was the main approach to Corkagh House, seat of the Finlay and Colley families from the 18th century until the last of the estate's two big houses burned down in the late 1970s. Some of the oaks that lined that approach are still standing, over two hundred years old, planted long before the fire and long before Dublin City Council opened the wider 300 acre demesne to the public in 1986. New oaks have been planted alongside the survivors since, close enough in age that telling the two generations apart takes a trained eye rather than a glance. Archaeologists working on the park's masterplan turned up the foundations of a medieval castle and a moated site here in 2023, a reminder that people have been building and rebuilding on this ground since at least 1326, when Corkagh first appears in the records as part of the Archbishop of Dublin's manor. The oaks are the one part of that long history still doing the job they always did: marking a way in.

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Frequently asked

What is the oldest tree in Dublin?: Very likely a yew in the private garden of the Old Glebe in Newcastle, estimated at 500 to 700 years old. It only opens to the public in May, June and mid-August.
Are Dublin's ancient trees free to visit?: Eight of the ten are free at any time. Áras an Uachtaráin's sequoia requires a free guided tour booked on the day, and the Old Glebe's yew only opens for a few weeks a year.
Why is there a tree eating a bench in Dublin?: A London plane at King's Inns grew directly against a cast iron bench roughly a century ago and never stopped. Its bark has since swallowed the seat's arms and back, earning it the name the Hungry Tree.
Why do so many of Dublin's oldest trees grow on former private estates?: Farmleigh, St Anne's Park and the National Botanic Gardens were all once private demesnes, several of them Guinness family property, bought by the state or Dublin Corporation over the 20th century and opened to everyone. Their original planting schemes survived the handover.
More on the oldest tree: What is the oldest tree in Dublin? The full answer, with map and directions.
More like this: Several of these trees also appear in Europe's 10 Most Remarkable Ancient Trees.
More cities: Ancient trees in Amsterdam · Ancient trees in Lisbon · Ancient trees in London · Ancient trees in Paris · Ancient trees in Rome · Ancient trees in Tokyo · Ancient trees in Istanbul · Ancient trees in Barcelona · Ancient trees in Kyoto · Ancient trees in Madrid · Ancient trees in New York

Know a tree that belongs on this list? Send it in. Suggestions feed curation; the list itself stays editorial.

Walk 4 of these trees about 5.5 km, 1h 14m on foot