Frankfurt bent a subway line rather than lose a lime tree. That is roughly the city's relationship with its old ones: an official Naturdenkmal register, refreshed in October 2025, that protects individual trees street by street. Four of the six here stand within a few hundred metres of each other in the Westend, between the Palmengarten, the Botanical Garden and Gruneburgpark, which makes that the walk. The other two are the lime itself, out in Eschersheim, and a plane from about 1820 in a strip of park in the middle of town.
0 of 6 visited in Frankfurt
Photo: Daviidos (CC BY-SA 3.0)
1
The Eschersheimer Linde
Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) · over 300 years · Eschersheim
Frankfurt bent a subway line rather than lose this lime. The U-Bahn under Eschersheimer Landstrasse curves slightly where the tree stands, the station beside it is called Lindenbaum, and so is the street. That is a lot of infrastructure named after one large-leaved lime.
It went in at the end of the 17th century as a landmark on what was then an open road out of the city, and it was the smaller of a pair. Locals called it the Kleine Linde, because a bigger Grosse Linde stood nearby until a storm brought that one down in 1923. Around five metres round and some 25 metres tall, it has been a protected natural monument since 1937.
Being a landmark on a road that turned into a city has cost it. The street was paved, the ground around it sealed, and the roots began to suffocate. It got tree surgery in 1955 and again in 1974, drainage in 1968, and by 1984 the city was pumping water and air into the soil around it to keep it alive. Frankfurt has now spent seventy years on life support for a tree it could have removed in an afternoon.
It stands directly on the public street, so there is nothing to pay and nothing to enter. Get off at Lindenbaum station and it is right there, which is the whole point of the name.
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2
The Dawn Redwood of the Botanical Garden
Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) · about 75 years · Westend-Nord
Until 1943 this species was known only from fossils. Metasequoia had been described from stone and written off as long extinct, and then living trees turned up in central China and seed went round the world's botanical gardens within a few years. Which means every large dawn redwood in Europe can be dated to within a human lifetime, and this one is among the first of them: it was planted in the Frankfurt Botanical Garden around 1950, as a cutting.
Seventy-five years later its trunk measures 5.72 metres round at chest height, which the German Dendrological Society ranks as the second thickest recorded specimen of its species in the country. It is a conifer that behaves like a broadleaf, putting out soft feathery needles in spring and dropping every one of them in autumn once they have turned rust orange.
It stands in the East Asia section, opposite the flat-roofed building and to the right of the bee house, which is precise enough to walk to. Entry to the Botanical Garden is free. The Palmengarten and its two protected beeches are next door, so the two gardens make a single afternoon, and the city added this tree to its register of natural monuments in 2025.
The odd thing to hold in your head under it: this tree is younger than the news of its own species, and it is already one of the biggest in Germany.
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3
The Weeping Beech of the Palmengarten
Weeping Beech (Fagus sylvatica 'Pendula') · about 180 years · Westend-Süd
This beech has been quietly making more of itself. Where its drooping branches reached the ground they took root, and what began as one tree is now a hall of leaves you can walk into. From outside it reads as a single heavy green dome. From underneath it is a room, held up by the parent trunk and by branch tips that grew themselves legs.
Frankfurt's own tree cadastre dates the planting to 1845. It stands just over four metres round and about 16 metres tall, and a tree surveyor who measured it in June 2023 recorded it as vital with some branch breakage, which is what happens to a weeping beech carrying that much weight sideways. The city put it on its register of natural monuments in 2025.
Weeping beeches are not a wild form. Every one is propagated from a mutant that hangs instead of reaches, so a garden that planted one in 1845 was buying a curiosity, and this is what a curiosity looks like after 180 years of being left alone.
It is in the western part of the Palmengarten by the Gesellschaftshaus, a short walk from the Palmenhaus and from the copper beech that is three decades older again. The Palmengarten charges admission, so this is the one tree in Frankfurt on this list you pay to stand under. Or inside, which is the better way to do it.
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4
The Copper Beech of the Palmengarten
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · about 210 years · Westend-Süd
The Palmengarten opened in 1871. This beech was already 56 years old. Frankfurt's tree cadastre dates its planting to 1815, the year of Waterloo, which makes it older than the garden that now charges people to come and look at it.
It is a grafted copper beech, which is how nearly all of them are made. The purple-leaved form does not come reliably true from seed, so a shoot of it is joined onto ordinary green beech rootstock, and on an old specimen you can often still find the join low on the trunk. A surveyor measured it at four and a half metres round in August 2022 and recorded its condition as vital. The city listed it as a natural monument in 2025, under the heading of beauty and rarity, which is an unusually frank thing for a register to write down.
It stands out on the meadow in the middle section of the park with room around it, so the whole low, wide crown is readable at once rather than in pieces through other trees.
Come in late April or May rather than in August. The new leaves open translucent red and only darken through the summer, and by high season the tree has gone almost black-purple and lost half of what makes the walk worth it.
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5
The Eight-Stemmed Linden of Grüneburgpark
Lime (Tilia sp.) · Westend
Eight trunks come out of the ground here in one tight ring, and they are a single tree. This is a Bündelpflanzung, a bundle planting: several young limes set into one hole so that they grow up together and merge into a single crown. It is deliberate, not an accident of self-seeding, and it is rare enough that Frankfurt made this one a protected natural monument in 2025.
It stands at a path crossing in the middle of the Grüneburgpark, beside the small children's playground, which puts it on everyone's route and almost nobody's list. Walk in among the stems and you are standing inside the tree rather than in front of it, with eight columns around you and one canopy overhead.
Nobody has established how old it is. No published record we can find carries a planting date, and the designation does not give one either, so this page does not guess. The same goes for which lime it is: small-leaved, large-leaved and the hybrid between them are close enough that neither source commits, and we are not going to commit for them.
If you know either answer, from a park archive, an old photograph or a plaque we have missed, tell us and it goes on the page. Meanwhile the park is free, open at all hours, and the tree is unmistakable once you are looking for eight of anything.
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6
The Plane Tree at the Nebbiensches Gartenhaus
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · about 210 years · Innenstadt
Seven metres and thirteen centimetres around the trunk, measured in October 2025. That is a plane tree you could not reach a tenth of the way around, standing in a strip of park a few minutes from Frankfurt's opera house. An independent big-tree survey recorded 713 centimetres last autumn; another surveyor measured 704 in 2022. Two measurements three years apart agreeing that closely is the kind of number worth trusting.
It was planted in 1820, ten years after the neoclassical pavilion it stands behind, the Nebbiensches Gartenhaus. Both sit in the Bockenheimer Anlage, part of the ring of parkland Frankfurt laid out on the ground where its city walls had stood, which is why the green in this part of town runs in a curve instead of a grid. The tree is around 35 metres tall with a crown some 26 metres across, and it carries entry 028 on the city's register of natural monuments.
Two centuries is not particularly old for a plane. It is old for this address, where a garden pavilion from 1810 now sits in sight of the banking towers.
Access is free and unrestricted at any hour, which is worth saying because two of the protected trees on this list stand behind an admission desk. This one is simply in a public park, and you can put your hand on it.
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