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 windbreak oak that grew several trunks instead of one, a cluster of botanic garden specimens gathered from three continents, and a scattering of Guinness family estates now open to everyone. Sixteen of these seventeen cost nothing to visit, though one keeps its gate locked for all but ten weeks a year.
0 / 17 visitati a Dublin
Foto: Declan Maher, via Geograph Britain and Ireland / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
1
The Hungry Tree
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 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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2
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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3
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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4
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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5
The Provost's Plane
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 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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Foto: Yair Haklai (CC BY-SA 4.0)
6
The Champion Planes of New Square
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 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 in 2018, one collapsing overnight in June and the other felled weeks later once the same fungal decay was found in it. 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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7
The Many-Trunked Holm Oak of St Anne's Park
Holm Oak (Quercus ilex) · 140 years · Raheny / Clontarf
Most of St Anne's Park's holm oaks do exactly what Lord Ardilaun planted them to do: stand in a straight, uniform line and block the wind coming off Dublin Bay. This one refused to cooperate. A 2009 field survey for the Heritage Trees of Ireland project singled it out from the surrounding avenue as a genuine arboricultural curiosity, a holm oak that grew several trunks from a single base instead of the clean single stem its neighbours all share, most likely the result of being cut back hard while young and responding by throwing up multiple new leaders rather than one. Evergreen and Mediterranean, like the rest of the avenue Ardilaun planted from the 1870s onward to shelter his estate from the coast's easterly winds, it has had a full century or more for its odd shape to settle into something closer to sculpture than accident, gnarled and dense where its neighbours are straight and orderly. It stands near the park's northeast corner, not far from the carved cypress trunk that draws most of the attention in this part of the grounds. Unlike that piece of dead wood turned into art, this one is still doing what a tree does every spring: pushing out new leaves from several trunks instead of one.
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Foto: William Murphy (CC BY-SA 3.0)
8
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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Foto: Wendy Cutler (CC BY-SA 2.0)
9
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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10
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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11
The Last Elm of College Park
Wych Elm (Ulmus glabra) · unconfirmed, likely over 80 years · Trinity College, Dublin 2
Trinity College once had around sixty elms scattered across its grounds, and Dutch elm disease is the obvious explanation for why almost none of them are left. Trinity's own botanists checked and found no trace of the fungus in college specimens, and now suspect something duller: soil conditions doing slowly what the disease usually does fast. Whatever the cause, this wych elm in College Park is the survivor, the last of a population that once shaded most of the campus and that mostly vanished across Ireland and Britain from the 1970s onward. Nobody at Trinity has put a number on its age. It was already established enough by the 1970s to be counted among the trees dying around it, which sets a floor under its age rather than a figure: call it at least eighty years, probably more. College Park is Trinity's cricket ground rather than a garden, so the elm shares its patch of grass with match days and net practice, a five minute walk from the queue for the Book of Kells and entirely ignored by it. It is easy to miss for the same reason it survived: nobody was watching this one closely enough to notice it was different, until one day it was the only elm left standing.
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12
The Glasnevin Atlas Cedar
Atlas Cedar (Cedrus atlantica) · roughly 120-165 years · Glasnevin
The Atlas Mountains cedar growing in Glasnevin is safer here than at home. Cedrus atlantica is native to a narrow band of mountains in Morocco and Algeria, and the IUCN now lists the species as Endangered in the wild, squeezed by drought, logging and a warming climate its native range cannot easily outrun. This specimen in the National Botanic Gardens has none of those problems, recorded by the Tree Council of Ireland's 2009 heritage survey among the garden's Exceptional Specimen Trees, likely somewhere between 120 and 165 years old by now. No second source describes this individual tree, so treat the age as a register estimate rather than a measured fact, honest as far as it goes. What the survey does record is form: a maiden tree, grown straight from seed rather than grafted, its blue green needles held in dense, upswept clusters along near-horizontal branches, the shape that made this species and its blue foliage varieties a favourite of formal Victorian planting schemes across Europe. Somewhere on a mountainside a few thousand kilometres south, its wild relatives are losing ground season by season. This one, planted decades before anyone worried about that, just keeps growing. It stands close to the Botanic Gardens' yew avenue, Addison's Walk, on the same afternoon's walk.
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13
The Glasnevin Dawn Redwood
Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) · roughly 65-115 years · Glasnevin
Until 1941, botanists knew the dawn redwood only from fossils, certain a conifer that shed its needles every winter had gone extinct millions of years earlier. Then living trees turned up in a valley in Sichuan, China, and seed from the first Western collecting expeditions went out to major botanic gardens worldwide by the late 1940s, ending the species' presumed extinction in real time rather than in a museum case. Glasnevin's specimen sits in that plausible window: the Tree Council of Ireland's 2009 heritage survey puts it at 50 to 100 years old then, which works out to roughly 65 to 115 now, consistent with descent from that original wave of seed, though no source confirms this exact tree's planting date or lineage. Metasequoia glyptostroboides is deciduous, unlike almost every other conifer, its feathery needles turning a rusty bronze each autumn before dropping, a habit that startles visitors expecting a fir or a pine to stay green all winter. It is a single-source find, register only, an honest gap rather than a padded one. Find it in the National Botanic Gardens, a short walk from Addison's Walk's yew avenue and this cluster's other exceptional specimens, one of the closest things botany has to a resurrection story growing quietly in a Dublin garden bed.
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14
The Glasnevin Caucasian Elm
Caucasian Elm (Zelkova carpinifolia) · roughly 165-215 years · Glasnevin
A nurseryman in County Offaly once took cuttings from this exact tree and started selling clones of it. Zelkova carpinifolia 'Glasnevin' is a named cultivar, propagated by Jan Ravensberg from material taken off this specific specimen in the National Botanic Gardens, one of the more unusual honours a single tree in Dublin has received: not just admired, but copied and put into commercial circulation under its own place name. The species itself, the Caucasian elm, comes from the mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian, and grows into a distinctive multi-stemmed, upright vase shape rather than the single trunk most elms produce, its bark smooth grey brown until age begins to plate it. Unlike Ireland's native elms, decimated by Dutch elm disease through the twentieth century, Zelkova carpinifolia carries strong natural resistance to the fungus, part of why old specimens like this one still stand where true elms mostly do not. The Tree Council of Ireland's 2009 heritage survey puts it at 150 to 200 years old then, roughly 165 to 215 now, the oldest of the garden's newly catalogued specimens, though no source gives a firm planting date. Autumn turns it a rich copper before the leaves drop. It stands 200 metres from Addison's Walk, well within the same visit.
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15
The Glasnevin Swamp Cypress
Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) · roughly 120-165 years · Glasnevin
A tree built for Louisiana swampland grows in a Dublin botanic garden, and it still remembers where it came from. Taxodium distichum, the swamp or bald cypress, is native to the flooded river bottoms of the southeastern United States, and where its roots sit in standing water it grows knobby woody projections called pneumatophores, or knees, that rise above the waterline, thought to help the tree breathe in waterlogged ground. Whether this particular Glasnevin specimen stands wet enough to show them is not confirmed by any source found, an honest gap rather than an invented detail. What the Tree Council of Ireland's 2009 heritage survey does confirm is the tree itself: one of the garden's Exceptional Specimen Trees, in the 100 to 150 year age band then, roughly 120 to 165 now. Like the dawn redwood elsewhere in this same cluster, it is a conifer that behaves like a deciduous tree, dropping its feathery needles each winter rather than holding them evergreen, a trait that confuses visitors twice in the same afternoon if they walk both trees back to back. No second source names this specific tree, so the age stands as a register estimate rather than a settled fact. It shares this corner of the National Botanic Gardens with the Atlas Cedar and Addison's Walk, all reachable on the same short walk.
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16
Ireland's Largest Tree of Heaven
Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) · disputed: register says 120-165 years, species norms suggest closer to 70-100 · Glasnevin
The largest Ailanthus altissima in Ireland stands framed between two Victorian glasshouses in Dublin, and nobody agrees on how old it actually is. Trees and Shrubs Online, the standard international dendrology reference, records it plainly as the country's largest specimen of the species, 17 metres tall with a trunk over a metre thick, shaped well enough that one garden writer has called it among the most elegant of its kind anywhere in Ireland or Britain. The disagreement is about age. The Tree Council of Ireland's 2009 heritage survey bands it at 100 to 150 years, which would put it past 160 now, but Ailanthus altissima is naturally short lived and fast growing, a species where seventy years already counts as a good age in the wild. Both figures are given here rather than one being quietly dropped: either a sheltered, cared-for botanic garden specimen has simply outlived what the species usually manages on a roadside or waste ground, which is plausible, or the register's band runs generous. What is not disputed is the position, framing the view toward the Palm House and Curvilinear Range, the garden's twin 19th century glasshouses, and the species itself, native to China, notorious elsewhere as an aggressive street weed but planted here deliberately, long before anyone thought of it that way.
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17
The Glasnevin Hybrid Strawberry Tree
Hybrid Strawberry Tree (Arbutus x andrachnoides) · roughly 120-165 years · Glasnevin
Peel back the bark on this tree and you find a second colour underneath. Arbutus x andrachnoides is a naturally occurring hybrid from the Mediterranean, a cross between the familiar strawberry tree and the smooth-barked Greek and Cypriot Arbutus andrachne, and it inherits the more dramatic parent's habit: chestnut brown outer bark that peels away in curling strips to reveal a glossy, copper red layer beneath, a colour show that has nothing to do with flowers or leaves. The Tree Council of Ireland's 2009 heritage survey lists a specimen of this hybrid among the National Botanic Gardens' Exceptional Specimen Trees, aged 100 to 150 years then, roughly 120 to 165 now. A dendrology reference, Trees and Shrubs Online, independently photographed a specimen of the same species at Glasnevin in 2017, evidence the hybrid grows and was recently alive in these gardens, though it cannot be fully confirmed that the photographed tree and the register's tree are one and the same rather than two separate plantings nearby. Treat the connection as likely, not certain. Either way, this is the weaker-evidenced tree in this corner of the gardens, worth visiting for the bark alone: run a hand along the trunk in late summer, after the old layer has started to curl, and the colour underneath is the reason to stop.
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