Eight of these trees stand within half a kilometre of Parliament Hill, across Confederation Square, Confederation Park and Major's Hill Park; six line the Rideau Canal further south, along Queen Elizabeth Driveway, Green Island and Dow's Lake; five more stand a short walk beyond, in the Dominion Arboretum. Canada's National Capital Commission keeps an official register of remarkable trees for the capital region, holding a lime beside the National War Memorial, a rare pair of vine-leaved limes and a Kentucky coffeetree among them. Most have never been dated precisely.
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1
The Response Linden
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · not documented · Downtown / ByWard core
The memorial this linden stands beside was built for one war and unveiled three months before the next one began. King George VI pulled the cover off it in May 1939, in front of a crowd of 100,000. The monument has a formal name, The Response, and it shows twenty-two bronze figures hauling a field gun and its team through a granite arch, soldiers and nurses and airmen pressed together in the gap. In 2000 the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was set into the ground in front of it, holding a Canadian recovered from a cemetery near Vimy Ridge whose name was never established.
The tree is the quiet part of all that. It stands at the memorial end of Confederation Square, a small-leaved lime with the dense rounded crown the species makes when nobody interferes with it, and it is the only thing in that square that changes with the season while the bronze does not. Every 11 November the national ceremony fills the ground beneath it. For the rest of the year it shades office workers eating lunch on the steps of the busiest traffic island in the country.
When it was planted, nobody wrote down. The capital's register of remarkable trees names the tree and gives it no date, and no other source has anything to say about this particular one. If you know its age, tell us.
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2
The Vitifolia Linden (west of the pair)
Large-leaved Lime 'Vitifolia' (Tilia platyphyllos 'Vitifolia') · roughly 125 years · ByWard Market / Major's Hill
Look up and the leaves look wrong for a lime. This is the Vitifolia cultivar of the large-leaved lime, selected for foliage that is broad, blunt-toothed and lobed enough to pass for a grapevine, which is what the name means. Two of them stand in Major's Hill Park about thirty-five metres apart, and they are the only ones the capital's register of remarkable trees lists anywhere in Ottawa. This is the western tree of the pair.
By the register's account both were held in the Central Experimental Farm nursery around 1897 and put in the ground here in or around 1900, which makes them roughly 125 years old. The hedging is the register's own and it stays: that one document is the only thing dating either tree. The man behind the planting is not in doubt. William Saunders ran the Dominion Experimental Farms from 1886 to 1911 out of the farm across town, and the nursery he built there supplied the stock that turned a working river port into somewhere a government could plausibly sit.
Major's Hill Park has been public ground since the 1870s, on the bluff where the Rideau Canal drops through its locks to the Ottawa River. The lime has stood through the whole modern life of the park, and from underneath it you look straight across the cut at Parliament Hill.
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3
The Vitifolia Linden (east of the pair)
Large-leaved Lime 'Vitifolia' (Tilia platyphyllos 'Vitifolia') · roughly 125 years · ByWard Market / Major's Hill
Ottawa's register of remarkable trees lists exactly two vine-leaved limes in the city, and this is the eastern one. Its twin stands thirty-five metres away across the grass. The cultivar carries the name Vitifolia because the leaves are cut like a grape's, big and coarse and nothing like the neat heart-shaped leaf most people picture on a lime. In the last week of June the crown hums: limes flower late, the scent carries, and every bee in the park works the tree at once.
The dating comes from a single source, the National Capital Commission's register, which says both trees were likely raised in the Central Experimental Farm nursery around 1897 and planted here in or around 1900. Roughly 125 years, then, with the register's own likely and its in-or-around left in place, because no second document names either tree.
What that decade explains is why they are here at all. Ottawa spent the years around 1900 deliberately rebuilding its own appearance, and ornamental stock from the government farm was the cheapest way to do it. Major's Hill Park sits on the bluff above the canal locks with Parliament Hill directly opposite, which made it the first place the effort showed. Stand between the two limes and you are standing in the result.
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4
The Yellow-wood of Major's Hill Park
American Yellowwood (Cladrastis kentukea) · not documented · ByWard Market / Major's Hill
The wild range of this species is a scatter of hillsides in Kentucky, Tennessee and the western Carolinas, and even there it is one of the rarest native trees in eastern North America. This one grows well over a thousand kilometres north of all of it, on the edge of a downtown park in Ottawa.
American yellowwood, Cladrastis kentukea, which older labels and the capital's own register still call Cladrastis lutea. The name is literal. The heartwood is bright yellow and was once boiled down for dye. The bark is smooth and pale grey, closer to a beech than to anything else growing near it, and the tree forks low and spreads wide, so it is one to walk under rather than past. Every few years, and pointedly not every year, it hangs the whole crown with drooping chains of white flowers that smell like wisteria, which is the family it belongs to. In the years it skips, it just makes leaves.
It shares this end of Major's Hill Park with the two vine-leaved limes, and unlike them it arrived without paperwork. The register names the tree and gives no planting date, and nothing else we can find mentions this specimen at all. Somebody in the parks service probably knows the year. If that is you, we would like it.
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5
The Serbian Spruce Trio
Serbian Spruce (Picea omorika) · not documented · Downtown / Elgin Street
In the wild, Serbian spruce survives in one place on earth: a handful of limestone gorges along the Drina, in the mountains between Serbia and Bosnia, where it hangs on as a leftover from a colder world. Three of them stand together in Confederation Park, close enough that they read as one tree with three trunks, a short walk from the city's South African War Memorial.
They are easy to pick out once you know what to look for. A Serbian spruce is absurdly narrow for its height, a spire rather than a cone, with short branches that sweep down and then turn up at the tips. The needles are flat, dark green on top and marked underneath with two chalk-white bands, so on a windy day the whole group flickers between green and silver. That narrow build is also why the species is planted here at all: it sheds the better part of two metres of snow a winter without losing its limbs.
Confederation Park itself opened in 1967, laid out for Canada's centennial on two and a half hectares between Elgin Street and the canal. When the three spruces went in is not recorded anywhere we can find, and the register that lists them gives no date. If you have a photograph of this corner from before they were there, that would settle it.
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6
The Mackenzie King Pear
Ussurian Pear (Pyrus ussuriensis) · not documented · Downtown / Elgin Street
A prime minister used to live where this pear is standing. Until 1923 William Lyon Mackenzie King rented at the Roxborough Apartments on Elgin Street, the grandest block in the city when it opened in 1910, and his diary is openly sentimental about the day he left it for Laurier House. The Roxborough came down in 1966 and Confederation Park was laid out over the site, so the smartest address in Ottawa is now lawn, memorials and one Ussurian pear.
The species comes from the Russian Far East and northern China and is about as cold-hardy as pears get, which is why it is here and why most orchard pears are not. In early May it flowers hard, the whole crown white, ahead of nearly everything else in the park. Whether anything follows is a point the sources argue about: the capital's register says a stand-alone Ussurian pear sets no fruit because it depends on cross-pollination, while growers of the species describe it as at least partly self-fertile, with a second tree improving the crop rather than making it possible. Go for the blossom, and treat any small hard pears in autumn as a bonus.
Its own age is unrecorded. The register names the tree, ties it to King's old address and stops there, which leaves the planting year open. Somebody watched it go in. If that was you, we would like the date.
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7
The Ottawa Improvement Commission Horse Chestnut
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · roughly 125 years · ByWard Market / Major's Hill
The body that planted this tree was called the Ottawa Improvement Commission, and it was handed sixty thousand dollars a year to make a lumber town look like a capital. It was created in 1899 and it is the ancestor of today's National Capital Commission. Its early planting leaned on the Central Experimental Farm across town, whose arboretum had gone from 200 trees in 1889 to 3,000 by 1899 and could supply stock by the wagonload. The capital's tree register puts this horse chestnut in those first years, likely planted circa 1900. Likely and circa are the register's own words and they stay: no second source names this particular tree. Call it roughly 125 years old and treat the year as approximate.
It is not a chestnut and it is not from anywhere near here. Aesculus hippocastanum grows wild in a few mountain valleys in the Balkans and was carried across Europe and then North America purely as an avenue tree, for the reason that shows in late May, when the crown fills with upright white flower spikes standing on the branches like candles. The nuts that drop in September are the ones children fight with and nothing eats.
It stands at the Sussex Drive end of the Major's Hill Park slope, a few minutes uphill from the two vine-leaved limes.
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8
The Tulip Season Willow
Crack Willow (Salix fragilis) · not documented · ByWard Market / Major's Hill
The crack willow is named for the noise, and the noise is the strategy. Its twigs snap off cleanly at the base in wind, float away down the water and root wherever they wash up, which is how one willow turns into a riverbank full of them. This one grows below Major's Hill Park on the slope toward the Ottawa River, with the National Gallery of Canada on one side and the twin spires of Notre-Dame Cathedral Basilica on the other. There are few better places in the city to stand under a tree.
Mid-May is when the ground around it is worth the walk on its own account. The park is planted out for the Canadian Tulip Festival, which began with a gift of bulbs from the Dutch royal family after the Second World War, and the beds run right up to the willow while the crowds work their way along them. The tree's own contribution to spring is a couple of weeks of small green catkins in April that nobody has ever crossed town for.
Willows grow fast, hollow early and are almost always younger than they look, which makes guessing at this one pointless. The register names it and records no age, no girth and no planting date. If anyone has put a tape around it, we would take the number.
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9
The Improvement Commission Sycamore
American Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis) · roughly 125 years · Golden Triangle, Centretown
The register that lists this tree files it under Northern eccentric, which is a polite way of saying it should not really be here. American sycamore is a tree of the eastern and central United States and reaches Canada only in the far south of Ontario. This one is growing beside the Rideau Canal, several hundred kilometres north of where its species gives up.
It arrived by programme. Between 1899 and 1904 the Ottawa Improvement Commission planted 14,000 trees and shrubs along what is now Queen Elizabeth Driveway, with another 11,000 waiting in the nursery, the work done by staff from the Central Experimental Farm. The National Capital Commission's remarkable trees register ties this sycamore to that campaign, which puts it at roughly 125 years old. Nobody has published a girth or an independent dating, so the age comes from the register's account of the planting rather than from the tree itself. The register also records an Indigenous name for it: Chikimeminij.
Sycamore is easy once you know the bark. The outer layer sheds in plates and leaves the trunk mottled cream, olive and grey, palest on the upper limbs, which is why a sycamore in winter reads almost white from the far bank.
The roadway closes to cars at weekends, so you can stand in the middle of the lane and look up without anybody minding.
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10
The Coffee-tree of Queen Elizabeth Driveway
Kentucky Coffeetree (Gymnocladus dioica) · roughly 125 years · Golden Triangle, Centretown
The name is literal. Settlers in Kentucky roasted the seeds of this tree and drank them, which is how a member of the pea family came to be called a coffee-tree.
It has no business being this far north. Ontario's own species at risk assessment, published in 2021, lists the Kentucky coffee-tree as threatened in the province, rarely found growing wild, and known as a planted tree as far north and east as Ottawa. This is one of those planted trees. The National Capital Commission's register says William Saunders had several of them put in near Queen Elizabeth Driveway at the beginning of the twentieth century, while the driveway was still being built, amid what it calls the general enthusiasm for growing rare North American trees. Saunders ran the Dominion Experimental Farms from 1887 until around 1911, which fits the claim, though no source outside the register connects him to this particular tree.
Coffee-trees are male or female, and only a female with a male in pollen range sets the thick leathery pods the species is known for. Nobody has recorded which this one is. That is a five second observation for anyone standing under it in autumn, and we would take the answer.
The leaf is the other thing to look for: doubly compound, up to about a metre long, and so late to appear that the tree spends half of spring looking dead.
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11
The Bur Oak of Queen Elizabeth Driveway
Bur Oak (Quercus macrocarpa) · not documented · Golden Triangle, Centretown
Bur oak is built to survive what kills other trees. The bark is thick and corky, the roots go deep, and the species tolerates the compacted, salted, drought-prone ground that a city road hands a tree. The National Capital Commission's register credits exactly that toughness for the size of this one, and calls it one of the most admired trees along Queen Elizabeth Driveway.
What the register does not give is a date. The sycamore and the coffee-tree a few hundred metres back are both tied to the Ottawa Improvement Commission's planting campaign of 1899 to 1904. This oak is tied to nothing, and lending it that date would be a guess wearing a fact's clothes. Open grown bur oaks in Canada can reach around two centuries, so the honest answer is that this one is somewhere under that and nobody has said where. If you know when it went in, or you have had a tape around the trunk, tell us and we will put the number on the page.
Find an acorn on the ground and you have the name. The cup is fringed with a shaggy burr and can swallow most of the nut.
The species is native to this part of the Ottawa valley, which is not true of the sycamore or the coffee-tree up the path. This is the local tree, and it is the one people stop for.
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12
The Green Island Catalpa
Northern Catalpa (Catalpa speciosa) · not documented · Green Island (Rideau Falls), Lowertown
For a couple of weeks in June this is the loudest thing on the island, hung with upright clusters of white flowers, each one frilled at the lip and spotted yellow and purple down the throat. For the rest of the year it carries beans. Northern catalpa fruits in slim pods up to half a metre long that stay on the tree all winter and rattle in the wind off the falls.
The island is Green Island, a scrap of land in the Rideau River at the waterfall, reached on foot over the Minto Bridges. The register that lists this tree dates those bridges to 1900 and names them for Lord Minto, then governor general; other accounts put the building at 1900 to 1902, and the two have never been reconciled.
The catalpa grows near the federal building that served as Ottawa's city hall from 1958, when Princess Margaret opened it, until amalgamation on the first day of 2001. The rest of the island belongs to the dead: the Ottawa Memorial, the Mackenzie-Papineau Monument, the National Artillery Monument, and a sculpture of John McCrae put up in 2015.
The tree has no date at all. The register dates the bridge and the building beside it and says nothing about the catalpa, and borrowing either number would be inventing an age. If you know one, tell us.
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13
The Century Willow of Dow's Lake
Golden Weeping Willow (Salix x sepulcralis) · around a century old · The Glebe, near Dow's Lake
The weeping willow is not from Babylon. The species that carries the name, Salix babylonica, came from China. This tree is a hybrid of it with the European white willow, and the hybrid is the only reason a weeping willow can stand an Ottawa winter at all.
The National Capital Commission's register calls this one huge and says it goes back to the earliest days of the Ottawa Improvement Commission, which planted it in the early twentieth century. That is as precise as the source gets, so around a century old is as precise as this page gets. The driveway it stands on was built between 1900 and 1905 and was lined with trees and gardens from the start, which is documented independently, though no source outside the register singles out this willow.
Golden weeping willow earns the first half of its name in late winter, when the leaves are gone and the hanging twigs turn a clear yellow that carries right across the water of Dow's Lake. It earns the second half from April on, when the crown comes down in curtains to the grass.
Nobody has measured the trunk. A willow this size is one of the few trees on the canal you can walk into rather than merely up to, which is worth doing once, preferably when nobody is watching.
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14
The Turn-of-the-Century Linden of Dow's Lake
Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) · roughly 125 years · The Glebe, near Dow's Lake
The register's entry for this tree is mostly about medicine. Large-leaved lime supplies Western pharmacology, homeopathy and herbal medicine with its flowers and its sapwood, mother tinctures included, and that is what the National Capital Commission chose to record about this specimen instead of its size.
You can see why once the flowers arrive. They open in late June, pale yellow-white, hanging in small clusters from a papery green bract that afterwards works as a wing and carries the seed away from the tree. They smell of honey from several metres off, and for a fortnight the crown is loud with bees. Dried, the same flowers are the tilleul sold in every French supermarket.
The register puts the planting at the turn of the twentieth century, along a driveway independently documented as built between 1900 and 1905, which fits, though that source does not name this tree.
One detail for anyone who has already walked Ottawa's other limes. This is the straight species, Tilia platyphyllos, not the cut-leaved cultivar of the pair standing in Major's Hill Park. Same genus, bigger and softer leaf, hairy underneath, and the earliest of the limes to flower, which means it goes over while the others are still in bud.
Nobody has put a tape around this one either. The path is free and the road beside it belongs to walkers at weekends.
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15
The Tom Thomson Jack Pine
Jack Pine (Pinus banksiana) · roughly 105 years · Central Experimental Farm / The Glebe
A jack pine keeps its cones locked shut with resin and waits for a forest fire to open them. Heat melts the seal, the scales spring apart, and the seed lands on ground that has just been cleared of competition. That is the tree the Friends of the Central Experimental Farm stop at as number 18 on their CelebriTrees walk, and the reason they stop is a painting. The jack pine is the species Tom Thomson made famous, the leaning Algonquin Park silhouette that became one of the best known images in Canadian art.
This particular pine never saw Algonquin. The National Capital Commission's register records it as planted in 1921 at the Dominion Arboretum, a documented date rather than an estimate, which makes it roughly 105 years old and one of the better dated trees in Ottawa. It has stood through a century of the Experimental Farm working as a research station in the middle of a growing capital.
The Friends' tour gives the height of its jack pine as about 20 metres. The register and the tour share no tree number, so that stop is matched to this trunk by species and by position on the same lowland path rather than by any common reference. Take the height as corroboration rather than as a measurement of this exact stem. Nobody has published a girth.
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16
The Living Fossil of the Dominion Arboretum
Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) · not documented · Central Experimental Farm / The Glebe
Botanists had a name for this species before anyone had seen one alive. Metasequoia glyptostroboides was known from fossils and assumed extinct until living trees were found in central China in the 1940s, which is why it gets called a living fossil and why arboretums everywhere wanted one.
This one grows in the northern section of the Dominion Arboretum, and the National Capital Commission's register singles it out as one of the few conifers that loses its needles in the fall. That is the thing worth timing a visit around: a tree that reads as an evergreen all summer turns, drops its foliage and stands bare through an Ottawa winter. The register says the species can reach 35 metres and three metres through where conditions favour it; in this climate the Friends of the Central Experimental Farm put the Arboretum's specimens nearer 25.
One honest warning before you walk out there. The Friends' CelebriTrees tour lists three dawn redwoods on these grounds, one on Heart Island and two in this northern section, one of them the 'Jade Prince' cultivar. The register entry carries no tree number to match against theirs, so the tree at this pin may be one of those or a fourth nobody has catalogued. No age, planting date or girth is recorded anywhere. If you know when it went in, tell us.
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17
The Swamp White Oak of the North Lookout
Swamp White Oak (Quercus bicolor) · not documented · Central Experimental Farm / The Glebe
Nobody thought this species grew here. The Friends of the Central Experimental Farm put it plainly on their CelebriTrees tour: the swamp white oak was not believed to be native to the Ottawa region until a few very mature trees turned up not far from the city, old enough to settle the question by standing there.
The National Capital Commission's register tags it for rarity and vulnerability. It says the Canadian population of swamp white oak is only a tiny fraction of the bur oak's, and that logging pressure pushed both species down. Ottawa has a bur oak on this map as well, on Queen Elizabeth Driveway, which makes the comparison something you can do in one afternoon: the common survivor and the one that almost slipped past the botanists.
This oak stands about 90 metres north of the North Lookout, near the old conifer windbreak, in the wooded ground of the Dominion Arboretum. The register gives it a species, a coordinate and a rarity tag, and stops there. No age, no planting date, no girth, from either source. If somebody has put a tape around this trunk, we would like the number.
Check which lookout you are at before you start counting oaks. There is a second swamp white oak in the Arboretum, near the South Lookout.
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18
The Rock Elm of the Dominion Arboretum
Rock Elm (Ulmus thomasii) · roughly 50 years · Central Experimental Farm / The Glebe
Dutch elm disease is remembered for what it did to the American elm, and it took this tree's species down with it. The rock elm is one of only three elms native to Canada, ranging up into southern Ontario and Quebec, and the same fungus that stripped the arching elms off North American streets went through rock elm as well. Quebec listed it as threatened in 2005.
So a healthy, mature rock elm standing in a protected arboretum is worth the detour, even though it is young by the standards of this map. The National Capital Commission's register says it has grown at the Dominion Arboretum for about half a century, which is the register's own loose phrasing and the only dating anybody has offered. Call it roughly 45 to 60 years and leave it at that until someone counts rings.
One caveat that changes what you are looking at. The register describes this tree as a horticultural form of the species rather than the wild type, meaning a nursery selection planted here deliberately. It is not a rock elm that held on by itself nearby, and it is no evidence that the species is quietly surviving in the Ottawa valley. What it is instead is a chance to stand in front of a Canadian native most Canadians have never knowingly seen. No girth has been published.
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19
The Founding-Era Bitternut Hickory
Bitternut Hickory (Carya cordiformis) · roughly 138 years · Central Experimental Farm / The Glebe
Somebody has been looking after this hickory since the 1880s, and wrote down when it went in. The National Capital Commission's register records it as cared for since it was planted sometime between 1886 and 1890, a four-year window where most register entries manage a vague century, and that puts the tree at roughly 136 to 140 years old.
The dates almost make a better story than they should. Wikipedia gives 1889 as the founding of the Dominion Arboretum, the oldest in Canada, and that year falls inside the register's planting window. Whether this hickory went into the ground with the Arboretum's first plantings or a season or two before them, nobody has recorded, and neither source claims it.
What the register does fix is the setting. The tree stands in the wooded part of the grounds among sugar maple and American beech, so this corner of the Farm reads as forest rather than as a display of specimens. It has held that spot through the whole working life of the Central Experimental Farm, from a research station on the edge of a small capital to one the city grew around.
The second source is thin and worth naming as such: an essay on the Arboretum's nut trees lists bitternut hickory among the species grown here and describes no individual tree. No girth has ever been published.
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20
The Mound Elm of Queen Elizabeth Driveway
American Elm (Ulmus americana) · roughly 120 years · Old Ottawa South, along the Rideau Canal
Most of the American elms that once lined Ottawa's streets and parkways are gone, killed by Dutch elm disease starting in the 1960s. This one survived. It stands on an artificial mound built into Queen Elizabeth Driveway around the turn of the 20th century, part of the Ottawa Improvement Commission's original scheme to turn a canal towpath into the capital's first scenic parkway, the same landscaping programme responsible for several of the driveway's other veteran trees. At roughly 120 years old, it predates the epidemic that took out most of its species in the region, which makes it less a curiosity than a survivor: whatever combination of luck, isolation and soil kept this elm alive while the disease worked through Ottawa's canopy is still standing to be seen. No girth has been recorded for it yet. It stands a short walk from Dow's Lake, one more stop on a driveway already known for its early-1900s tree plantings, distinguished from its neighbours by the mound it grows on and by being the kind of tree the region mostly lost.
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21
The Red Oak of Queen Elizabeth Driveway
Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) · Old Ottawa South, along the Rideau Canal
The register that protects this oak does not say when it was planted, and for once that gap is not an oversight: unlike the exotic and ornamental trees the Ottawa Improvement Commission planted along Queen Elizabeth Driveway around 1900, red oak is native to this stretch of the Rideau valley, so this one could easily predate the parkway's own landscaping of winding trails and artificial mounds rather than belong to it. The National Capital Commission's own description calls it simply huge, singling it out among a section of driveway otherwise planted with imported ornamentals for the contrast a native tree makes against them. It stands about 200 metres south of the parkway's Mound Elm, near where Queen Elizabeth Driveway runs along the canal south of Dow's Lake. Nobody has measured its girth or dated it, so both remain open questions: if you have stood under it with a tape measure, this is the tree to tell us about.
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