Zurich's oldest trees survive for reasons that have little to do with nature conservation: a park's own colour-coded planting tags date a 1780 plane tree to the year, a railway magnate planted a giant sequoia in 1858 to mark his daughter's birth, a private bank negotiated for years with a tram line to keep a 120-year-old sequoia outside its offices, and a 550-year tradition of replanting lindens on the founding hilltop means the trees there today are younger than the site's reputation suggests. Two more are day trips: an old oak at Marthalen, and the eleven-metre linden of Linn.
0 / 6 visités à Zurich
1
The 1780 Planes of Platzspitz
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · around 246 years · Altstadt
Platzspitz is Zurich's second-oldest public park, laid out on the wedge of land where the Sihl and Limmat rivers meet, and its own conservation survey has tagged its plane trees by planting year with a simple system of coloured markers: brown for 1780, blue for 1806, green for 1836, red for 1960, violet for 2005. The brown-tagged cohort, planted in 1780, includes at least one specimen the city's own gardeners describe as priceless, a tree already a generation old when Napoleon's armies crossed the Rhine, and the park itself has been rebuilt and replanted around it for two centuries since. Platzspitz's own documented history as a public space runs back roughly 450 years, documented in plans and drawings, though little from the earliest layouts survives above ground; the 1780 planes are themselves already part of that long rebuilding rather than an original feature. The tagging system means a visitor with sharp eyes and no guidebook can date individual trees just by checking the colour of the marker at the base, a small piece of park bureaucracy that turns Platzspitz's plane trees into a walkable timeline of Zurich civic gardening since the late 18th century.
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2
Alfred Escher's Giant Sequoia
Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · over 165 years · Enge
Alfred Escher built modern Switzerland's railway network, founded the bank that became Credit Suisse and the institution now known as ETH Zurich, and by most accounts had almost no time left over for anything else. In 1858, he apparently made an exception: he planted this giant sequoia at Belvoirpark, his family's lakeside estate, to mark the birth of his only daughter, Lydia. The tree has since grown into the oldest confirmed giant sequoia in Zurich, well over 160 years old, a California native that tolerates Central European frost far better than its coastal redwood relatives and can, in its native range, live past 3,000 years, which makes even this Escher-era specimen a relative sapling by the standards of its own species. Belvoirpark itself began as Escher's grandfather's vineyard hillside, purchased in 1826 and planted with what were then exotic North American species around a new villa; the city of Zurich has owned the grounds since 1901, and what was once a private garden for one of the country's most powerful families is now a public park anyone can walk into and stand beneath a tree Escher planted for a child who would have been barely taller than it herself.
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3
The Lindens of Lindenhof
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · 55-165 years, several planting generations · Altstadt
Zurich's history is often said to begin on this hilltop, a Roman customs post and later a Carolingian imperial palace, and lindens have been planted here continuously since at least 1474, when a chronicle records 52 trees going into the ground at once. None of those original trees survive; a severe storm in 1861 destroyed much of the historic stand, and an attempt to replace the lindens with other species was rejected by Zurich's own residents so firmly that the substitutes were dug up and replaced with lindens again within 15 years. Most of what grows on Lindenhof today dates from that 1860s-1870s replanting, making the oldest individual trees a little over 150 years old rather than the 500-plus years the site's own name and reputation imply. One tree breaks that pattern in a different direction: in 1971, the year Swiss women finally won the right to vote at the federal level, a new linden was planted here specifically to mark it. Lindenhof's real age is the age of the tradition of replanting it, not any single trunk standing today.
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4
The Mammutbaum of Hohlstrasse
Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · around 120 years · Altstetten
This giant sequoia predates the seven-storey bank building that now looms over it by decades, and it nearly lost that seniority battle anyway. Around 2012, plans for the Limmattalbahn, a new tram line through Zurich's Altstetten district, threatened to require felling the roughly 120-year-old tree to make room for the widened road. Julius Baer, the private bank whose Altstetten offices had been built around the sequoia rather than the other way round, spent years in negotiation with the tram line's operators rather than accept the loss, eventually reaching a settlement in which the route was adjusted and the tree kept its ground. It stands today nearly 15 metres tall, still growing on a stretch of Hohlstrasse that has since gone through a full redevelopment masterplan, approved by Zurich's city council in 2026, which explicitly names the sequoia as a feature to preserve rather than remove. A bank saving a tree from a tram line is not the story anyone would predict for one of Zurich's oldest giant sequoias, and it is not the kind of protection any nature reserve or heritage listing arranged. It happened because the people who owned the ground next to it decided the tree was worth the years of negotiation, which is its own kind of durability.
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Photo : Kurt Spalinger-Røes (CC BY 3.0)
5
The Marthalen Oak
Oak (Quercus sp.) · over 360 years · Abistwald, Marthalen
The walk to one of the oldest oaks in Switzerland crosses a football pitch, and the village museum that documents the tree advises bringing a ball.
The Ortsmuseum Marthalen puts the oak at over 360 years old, with a trunk 1.8 metres across, roughly 5.6 metres round, standing in the Abistwald north of the village. That museum is the only real source on it. Regional tourism pages repeat the same figures back, which is not the same thing as a second opinion, so read the age as the museum's estimate rather than a settled fact.
The forest around it does the corroborating. Marthalen's own timber inventory records an unusual concentration of very large stems here, over 112 centimetres in diameter at breast height and predominantly oak, a category with only a few dozen entries in the whole canton. This is not a lone survivor in a plantation. It is the biggest tree in a wood that has been growing big trees for a long time, in a village whose coat of arms is an oak.
Which oak it is remains open. Quercus robur and Quercus petraea both grow here and no source we found commits either way. If you can tell them apart by the acorn stalks and the leaf bases, you can settle this for us on the spot.
Marthalen is 25 to 30 minutes by direct train from Zurich.
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6
The Linden of Linn
Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) · roughly 800 years · Linn, Boezberg
Local legend says that if this linden's shadow ever stops reaching Habsburg Castle, the world ends. The tree is eleven metres round, twenty-five metres tall and roughly 800 years old, which by the canton's own reckoning makes it the mightiest tree in Aargau and would make it a sapling around the time Rudolf von Habsburg, founder of the dynasty the castle is named for, was born.
A second legend is more popular and less durable: that survivors of the plague planted it, in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The tree's own dating rules that out by several hundred years. Both stories are worth knowing, only one of them can be true, and it is the tree that settles the argument.
Eleven metres of circumference is enormous even for a large-leaved lime, a species that fuses, splits and re-roots itself into fluted multi-stemmed trunks as it ages. What you walk up to is less a trunk than a small ruined building with leaves on top.
It stands at the entrance to Linn village, directly at the bus stop, and Aargau's tourist board calls it very popular, which is a polite warning about Sunday afternoons. From Zurich this is a real trip rather than a stroll: train to Brugg, then a local connection onward, 45 to 60 minutes each way.
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