Budapest's oldest trees survive because a Habsburg palatine liked gardening. Archduke Joseph turned Margaret Island into his private botanical retreat in the 1810s and 1820s, planting a plane tree the city and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences later jointly named the Tree of Science, and employing the gardener behind a Japanese pagoda tree at Buda Castle that went on to survive a revolution, an emperor's redesign plans, and two world wars. A mulberry from Maria Theresa's silk industry and a war-scarred plane the city renamed in tribute round out a list built entirely on trees Budapest fought to keep standing.
0 / 12 visitati a Budapest
1
The Tree of Science
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · around 203 years · Margaret Island
Archduke Joseph, Palatine of Hungary, planted this plane tree with his own hands in 1823 on what was then his private island retreat, two years before Count Istvan Szechenyi founded the Hungarian Academy of Sciences a short walk away across the water. The near-coincidence in dates gave the tree its modern title: the city and the Academy jointly named it the Tree of Science, a formal honour for a plane that has quietly outlasted both the Habsburg court that planted it and the war that nearly took its neighbours. Its statistics explain the reputation on their own: a trunk 6.64 metres around, a crown 55 metres wide, and a canopy foresters have estimated at 30 to 50 tonnes of leaf and wood, among the most admired plane crowns anywhere in Europe. It has stood through two world wars, the 1956 revolution, and repeated redesigns of the island around it, rooted between the ruined Dominican convent where Saint Margaret of Hungary once lived and the Art Nouveau water tower built in 1911. Archduke Joseph is the reason Margaret Island has any ancient trees at all: he turned a semi-wild royal hunting ground into a private garden in the 1810s and 1820s, planting exotic specimens with no way of knowing they would still be standing two centuries later, at nearly double the height of the buildings around them.
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2
The Pagoda Tree of Buda Castle
Japanese Pagoda Tree (Styphnolobium japonicum) · 230-250 years · Castle Hill
By the time Franz Joseph became emperor, this tree had already outlived the reason anyone remembered planting it. Antal Tost, gardener to Palatine Joseph, chose a Japanese pagoda tree for the slope beside Buda Castle's great southern rondella around 1790, when the species itself was still a botanical novelty in Europe, imported from China only a few decades earlier despite its misleading name. By 1862, an academic lecture was already calling it the largest tree in the castle garden. It survived the 1848-49 revolution, when fighting tore through the district around it, and came close to losing a very different fight decades later: when the castle's gardens were redesigned at the end of the 19th century, the plan called for the tree's removal, until head gardener Karoly Mraz personally persuaded Franz Joseph to spare it. It survived the Second World War too, through fighting that flattened much of the district above it. Today it stands roughly 230 to 250 years old by the estimates on record, Budapest's oldest documented tree, on ground that is free to walk through the South Gardens' terraces. Locals nicknamed it simply the Nagy Fa, the Big Tree, long before anyone thought to give it a more official name.
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3
The Old Acacia of Erzsebet Square
Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) · 150-165 years · Belvaros-Lipotvaros
A 1960s survey by Budapest's own parks department already described this black locust as over a hundred years old, which places its planting somewhere in the 1860s, not long after Erzsebet Square itself was laid out on the site of a demolished monastery cemetery. It has stood at the corner toward Jozsef Attila utca through everything the square went through since: the aftermath of the square's namesake, Empress Elisabeth's assassination in 1898, the arrival of the city's first long-distance bus station on the same ground in the 20th century, and the underground shopping centre and park redesign that replaced the bus station later still. Black locusts are not typically long-lived or especially prized trees; 19th-century Hungary planted them mainly to bind the sandy soil of the Great Plain rather than for their looks, which makes this one's survival at the dead centre of the capital more a matter of civic accident than deliberate preservation. It has not gone entirely unscathed: its upper branch dried out sometime in the 1980s, and it has leaned slowly ever since, now propped at two points by the city's own parks maintenance company rather than left to fall on its own schedule. Nobody planted it to be remembered. It simply refused to be removed for a century and a half while the square around it was rebuilt three times over.
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4
The Taban Mulberry
White Mulberry (Morus alba) · 200-300 years · Taban
Popular legend says Ottoman occupiers planted this mulberry during their century and a half ruling Buda, which would make it well over 400 years old; the more carefully sourced version, and the one this project follows, credits Empress Maria Theresa's 18th-century push to build a domestic silk industry, which put mulberry orchards across Taban specifically to feed silkworms, with a 1771 report confirming mulberries already growing in the district by then. Either story would make it one of the oldest trees in Budapest; historians settle on 200 to 250 years as the defensible range, though some push it as high as 300. It once grew inside the yard of a house whose fence has long since vanished, its canopy spilling toward what was then the top of the Komuves lepcso, a stone staircase since rebuilt slightly further along the hillside than its original route. By 2021 the tree was in poor enough condition that Budapest's parks authority began active conservation work to save it, propping and pruning rather than letting a specimen this rare simply fail. A sign on today's Taban Botanical Trail warns visitors not to climb its branches, a small, practical reminder that a centuries-old story is still standing on a genuinely fragile trunk.
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5
The Seven Chieftains Plane
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · around 80 years · Margaret Island
This tree is not the one its name first belonged to. Palatine Joseph's original favourite plane on Margaret Island, split into seven trunks after an 1838 flood snapped it as a sapling, was struck by lightning and finally died around 1935; Hungarians called it the Het Testver, the Seven Brothers. A different plane growing 265 metres north, opposite what is now the Palatinus Strand, took catastrophic damage of its own during the fighting that swept the island in January 1945. Rather than remove it, head gardener Antal Kunsch cut the wrecked trunk back hard, and the tree responded by resprouting into seven new limbs of its own, an accident of pruning that echoed the older tree closely enough that Budapest's parks authority renamed it in tribute: the Hetvezer, the Seven Chieftains. Eight decades later it casts roughly 300 square metres of shade, nearly 30 metres tall, its bark peeling in the mottled patches typical of old planes, on ground that thousands of sunbathers walk past every summer on their way to the baths without necessarily knowing they are looking at a war wound that became one of the island's best-loved trees.
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6
The Old St Lucie Cherry of the Fuveszkert
St Lucie Cherry (Prunus mahaleb) · around 250 years · Jozsefvaros
The St Lucie cherry is usually a shrub. Six metres is a good one. This tree is 11.2 metres tall, with a trunk 339 centimetres around and a crown twelve metres wide, which is extraordinary for a species that normally grows out of a dry limestone slope at the edge of a wood. Hungarians call it sajmeggy. Nobody expects one to reach the size of an oak.
It also got here first. ELTE's Fuveszkert is Hungary's oldest botanical garden, founded in 1771, but it only reached this ground in 1847, when the university bought the ten hectare Festetics castle garden with the backing of Palatine Archduke Joseph. Before the Festetics family took the property in 1798 it belonged to Marton Szeleczky, an imperial loyalist, and the cherry was already standing on his private estate. The garden was laid out around it rather than planted with it. At roughly 250 years old it has watched a nobleman's grounds turn into a scientific collection and then into a place anyone can buy a ticket to, without ever moving.
It stands alone beside the main path, about eighty metres in from the Illes utca gate, on level ground you can reach with a pushchair or a wheelchair. Our pin is the garden rather than the tree, so look for the solitary one with the wide low crown.
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7
The Count's Mulberry of Karolyi Garden
White Mulberry (Morus alba) · roughly 230-250 years · Belvaros-Lipotvaros
It takes two adults with their arms spread to get around this trunk, and nobody knows who planted it. The two candidates sit half a century apart. Count Antal Karolyi bought the palace next door in 1768 and rebuilt the garden in the baroque manner soon after, which would make the mulberry a tree of the late 1700s. A later Karolyi, Gyorgy, modernised the same garden in the 1830s. Both sources that describe it say plainly that the planting date is unknown and neither picks a side, so somewhere between 230 and 250 years is the working figure rather than a fact.
What it stood through is better documented. In 1795 the palace held its reception for the newly installed Palatine Joseph, and in 1800 a name day ball for Alexandra Pavlovna, both of them spilling out into this garden. In 1838 the Danube came into Pest and the palace took in hundreds of families whose houses had dissolved in the water. After the 1848 revolution failed, General Haynau ran his headquarters from the same building, and the garden outside went on being a garden.
It is probably the oldest white mulberry in Hungary. Safety pruning has left it blunter than it was, which is the price of keeping a heavy old tree standing in a park full of children. Look along the perimeter wall near the Ferenczy Istvan utca gate. In June and July the fruit drops and stains the path.
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8
The Old Acacia of Szechenyi Square
Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) · documented as 227 years (planted 1789), though disputed; possibly considerably younger · Belvaros-Lipotvaros
This tree is celebrated for being 227 years old, and a historian has taken that number apart with photographs. The popular account, carried by Az Ev Faja when the tree was nominated in 2015, has it planted in 1789, the year the Bastille fell, as the last survivor of a Danube side avenue laid out in the 1780s. That would make it older than the Chain Bridge beside it, older than the Academy of Sciences and older than the Gresham Palace.
Then Zsofia Viczian went through the pictures. Photographs and postcards of the square from before 1867 show no tree at this spot, only the mound of earth raised for a coronation. Gyorgy Klosz photographed the place in 1875 and cart drivers are standing where the trunk was supposedly already growing. The tree first appears as a substantial thing in a postcard from the 1930s, which would put it nearer 120 or 150 years. Both accounts are in print and neither has given way.
Whatever its age, it is a wreck kept upright by attention. The trunk leans hard, about four metres around and only six metres tall, propped since the 1980s on wooden supports set on iron beams, cushioned where they meet the bark. A large branch died in that decade and took its counterweight with it. It came through the war and nine renamings of the square. It stands on a paved traffic island, so you cross a road to reach it.
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9
The Plane Tree of Dobrentei Square
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 115 years · Taban / Viziváros, Buda Castle district
Everything else on this square went. Twentieth-century clearance took Tabán's palaces, its cafes and its Serbian Orthodox church, and the oldest thing left standing on Döbrentei tér is a plane tree of about 115 years. Photographs from the 1900s and 1910s catch it as a young tree, which is how a Budapest history publication dated it, and FŐKERT, the city's parks company, carries it on its own register of notable trees. The trunk is over four metres around and the crown reaches about twenty metres, higher than the roofs beside it, and visibly lopsided, because the tree has never been able to spread toward the building at its back. It came through the fighting around Buda Castle in the 1940s that flattened much of this neighbourhood, and then through the rebuilding of the Elizabeth Bridge, when trees at the bridgehead were candidates for removal. District I gave it local protection in 2011 and fixed a plaque to the trunk. The beer garden at its foot took the name Platán from it, and generations have used the tables in its shade as a meeting point. A second plane stands nearby by the Rudas baths; this entry is the Döbrentei tér tree, the documented and protected one. The pagoda tree at Buda Castle is 350 metres uphill, the Tabán mulberry about 600.
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10
The Black Walnut of the Franciscan Ruins
Black Walnut (Juglans nigra) · roughly 219 years · Margaret Island
Budapest's biggest black walnut is also the frailest tree on this list, and both facts come from the same survey. FŐKERT, the city's parks company, dated it to around 213 years in its 2020 dendrological study of Margaret Island, which makes it roughly 219 now, and measured its trunk as the thickest black walnut on the island by a wide margin: the runner-up was 119 centimetres smaller around. A national database ranked it second in Hungary for trunk girth. It was probably one of the first trees planted here, in the early 1800s under head gardener Károly Tost, beside the palatine's summer residence. A 1907 newspaper piece describes a walnut in a meadow at the island's centre, 3.5 metres around and 25 metres tall, almost certainly this one. The same 2020 assessment found it hollow and rotting at the trunk and root collar, its crown cut hard back after storm damage and a safety pruning in 2016, and estimated it had about a decade left. That window closes around 2030. It was standing at the last assessment and it is very likely standing now, but the newest evidence here is six years old, so go with your eyes open. It stands by the Franciscan ruins, a hundred metres from the island's oldest yew and 350 from its oldest oak.
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11
The Island's Oldest Pedunculate Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 209 years · Margaret Island
This oak is older than the park it stands in. Margaret Island was redeveloped as a landscape park under Archduke Joseph in the 19th century, and a handful of trees on the higher, better-drained eastern strip predate that work as remnants of the oak, ash and elm floodplain forest that covered the ground before anybody designed anything. This pedunculate oak is the island's largest and one of its oldest: FŐKERT's 2020 survey dates it to around 203 years then, so roughly 209 now, and a 1988 measurement put it at 28 to 30 metres tall with a trunk 345 centimetres around. Little of that old forest is left. Around a hundred oaks over ninety years old remain on the island's public land, most of the losses coming from the 2010 flood and the storms of that decade. Its shape records a life spent in a crowd. The crown is asymmetric from growing hemmed in by neighbours, structural limbs were cut back decades ago, and the cavities left by removed branches have recently been treated. Nothing in the record suggests decline, though the most recent condition assessment is the 2020 one. It stands in the Upper Rose Garden beside Zielinszky Szilárd sétány, about 350 metres from the Tree of Science, the Seven Chieftains Plane and the island's black walnut, which together make a loop of under two kilometres.
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12
The Island's Oldest Yew
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · roughly 209 years · Margaret Island
Two old yews stand near the Franciscan ruins on Margaret Island, and only one of them still reads as a tree. This is the larger. The other was cut back radically decades ago for reasons nobody wrote down, and now sits at 4.5 metres tall under a crown 7 to 8 metres wide, so anyone comparing the two is not looking at damage from the same event but at one tree that was left alone and one that was not. FŐKERT's 2020 survey of the island calls this the largest and oldest yew there, with nothing comparable anywhere else on the island, and dates it to around 203 years at the time, so roughly 209 now. A former head gardener put it in the 1800s independently. A 1967 survey recorded four old shrub-form yews on the island, two of them standing on their own by the Franciscan ruins; this is one of that pair. For a yew, 209 years is nothing. The species runs to millennia, and English churchyards hold specimens ten times this age, which makes the island's oldest yew a young tree with old damage: rot at the root collar and trunk, bark loss, a major limb long gone leaving the crown truncated, lower branches clipped since a 2012 tidy-up. The most recent assessment is 2020. The black walnut is a hundred metres away.
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