Gdansk protects 157 individual trees by official designation, more than almost any city this project has covered. Four stand alone across the districts: a willow that survived an arson attack, an ash older than the rifle factory built around it, an oak that predates the battle its hill is named for, a beech older than every owner of its park. Six more sit close together in Park Oliwski, among them a three-trunked katsura that smells of caramel in October and an elm wrapped in flowering ivy. Two older still are up the coast in Gdynia. All free.
0 / 12 Gdanskで訪れた数
写真：Zbigniew Zielinski (Drumeros) (CC BY-SA 3.0)
1
The Willow of Kupaly-Subislawa
White Willow (Salix alba) · ~140 years · Oliwa
Seven months ago this willow was still whole. On 29 December 2025, someone or something, fireworks testing has not been ruled out, set fire to the trunk of this 140-year-old white willow beside a pond in Oliwa, and the blaze burned out its core before neighbours spotted the flames and called the fire brigade. Firefighters put it out in time to save the tree next to it, a second protected willow believed to be around 165 years old, growing close enough that the fire could easily have spread. What was left standing had been hollowed out from the inside, its trunk statically unsafe, so the city's ecology department made the call foresters dread: cutting roughly four metres off the crown of a tree that had carried official protection since 2000, girth 495 centimetres, height 22 metres, just to keep it upright. The city filed a police report and the case remains open. What happens next genuinely is not settled. Botanists monitoring the tree say it may sprout new growth this season, though never at its old height again, and if it does not survive at all, Gdansk plans to leave the trunk standing anyway as deadwood habitat rather than remove it. For now it is alive, recovering by inches at a pond most of Oliwa walks past without knowing what stands there.
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2
The Ash of the Royal Rifle Factory
European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) · ~280 years · Dolne Miasto
This ash tree is older than the gun factory that grew up around it. The Prussian state's Royal Rifle Factory moved onto this stretch of Lakowa street in 1839, converted from an earlier sugar refinery, and expanded through the 19th century into a complex that at its 1918 wartime peak turned out 2,500 rifles a day with 6,500 workers on the payroll, before closing for good in 1921 when the newly independent Free City of Danzig demilitarised. The ash predates all of it, estimated at around 280 years old, which puts its own roots down sometime in the early 18th century, decades before anyone here was making weapons. It stands 26 metres tall with a trunk 523 centimetres around, in what is now a quiet courtyard inside the old factory walls. Its protected status is recent and came from an unusual source: since April 2017, Gdansk has run a programme letting any resident nominate a tree for legal protection, and this ash, tucked away where most passersby would never look for it, was one of the results. A factory that armed a kingdom rose and fell around it in under a century. The tree just kept growing.
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写真：Zbigniew Zielinski (Drumeros) (CC BY 3.0)
3
The Oak of Wzgorze Luizy
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · ~250 years · Lostowice
At the foot of a hill named for a dead queen's role in defeating Napoleon grows Lostowice's oldest documented tree. Wzgorze Luizy, a 68 metre moraine hill, was named in 1810 for Louise of Prussia, credited with brokering the Prussian-Russian alliance that helped bring Napoleon down five years later; in 1813 Prussian Landwehr troops clashed with Napoleonic forces on this exact hill, and in 1817 an iron cross went up on the summit naming nine officers who died in it. This pedunculate oak, protected as a natural monument since the late 1980s and estimated at around 250 years old, was already mature when that battle happened, growing quietly at the base of the slope while history took place above it. It has outlasted the monument's own turbulent afterlife: the hill was informally renamed for a local landowner after the Second World War, and only recently got an official viewpoint restoring some of its original prominence. Two younger trees, an oak and a beech, grow near the summit closer to the iron cross itself, added to the protected list decades after this one. Of the three, this is the tree that was already old when the story the hill is named for happened.
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4
The Beech of Ludolfino
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · ~180 years · Oliwa
An opera singer's wife gave her name to this park, and this beech has outgrown every owner who has held it since. Ludolfino takes its name from Dorothea Ludolphine Bachmann-Ackermann, wife of the singer who first carved this estate out of the neighbouring Stawowie grounds in the late 18th century; the property shows up on city maps as early as 1822. It changed hands repeatedly after that, the Braune family from 1877, a private owner named Robert von Kolkow from 1922, an Evangelical religious order that ran it as a deaconess house from 1933, and the Polish state from 1957, before landing with Gdansk's physical education academy, AWFiS, which now uses the old manor as its main library. This common beech has been protected as a natural monument since 1988, its trunk 470 centimetres around and its crown 24 metres tall, growing on ground that has technically never once belonged to the tree itself. Students studying inside the converted manor now walk past it without necessarily knowing they are passing something that predates every institution that has ever owned the land beneath it.
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写真：Fry72 (Karel Frydrýšek), CC BY-SA 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
5
Marysienka's Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · about 350 to 400 years; sources give both figures and neither is a ring count · Kolibki, Gdynia Orlowo
In 1685 the estate around this oak became the property of Jan III Sobieski, the king who had broken the Ottoman siege of Vienna two years earlier. The story attached to the tree is about his wife. Marysienka is said to have rested under it, and in the grotto a little further on, which looks out over the sea.
That is a legend and the sources say so. What is on record is drier and nearly as good: the oak went into the Gdynia register of natural monuments on 28 June 1966, one of the first entries, and it is the oldest protected tree in the city. Girth 4.87 metres, height 26.
It used to be a twin. Two trunks had fused into one and in 1988 they came apart. The broken half is still lying near the base, and the surviving trunk has been propped and reinforced ever since, which is what you see first: pale timber struts running up under the lower limbs like scaffolding somebody forgot to take down.
The estimates run from 350 to 400 years and nobody has counted the rings, so the tree either predates Sobieski's purchase or arrived shortly after it. Both would make the legend possible, which is presumably why it has lasted.
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写真：Fry72 (Karel Frydrýšek), CC BY-SA 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
6
The Ash of King Jan
European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) · about 320 years · Kolibki, Gdynia Orlowo
Six metres and ten centimetres round. For an ash that is close to the limit of what the species does, and it is the thickest tree in this park by a wide margin, wider than the famous oak two hundred metres downhill that everybody comes to see.
Ash is not a tree people expect to find ancient. It grows fast, it dies at two hundred years in most places, and across Europe it is currently being killed in enormous numbers by a fungus that arrived from Asia. This one is about 320 years old and standing, in the park that belonged to Jan III Sobieski and that carries his name on the tree.
What you see at the base is two trunks growing hard against each other, fused along the seam, with the bark ridged into the diamond pattern old ash makes. The register plaque is screwed to the fork. Poland entered it as a natural monument on 5 May 2012, which is late: the oak in the same park had been protected since 1966. Nobody seems to have measured this one until much later.
It stands back from the main path, in the trees, which is why it is easy to walk past.
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7
The Maples of Hugo Conwentz
Field Maple (Acer campestre) · roughly 150 to 200 years · Oliwa
Gdansk's newest protected tree is not one tree but two. On 26 February 2026 the city council entered a pair of field maples standing side by side in Park Oliwski onto Poland's register of natural monuments under a single record, the most recent designation on a city roll of 157 protected trees. The larger has a trunk 245 centimetres round and stands 19.5 metres; its companion measures 180 centimetres and 17 metres. Field maple is a slow, modest species that rarely gets big, and 245 centimetres is a considerable size for it, which puts these two somewhere around 150 to 200 years old. That figure comes from the trunk rather than from a document: no planting record has turned up.
The name is the other half of it. The register calls them Klony Hugo Conwentza, the Maples of Hugo Conwentz, after the botanist who ran this city's provincial museum and who is widely credited with founding the world's first state conservation agency, the Prussian office for the care of natural monuments, in 1906. The category these two maples have just been entered under is the one his office existed to administer. What the register does not say is why these particular trees carry his name. If you know, tell us.
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8
The Ginkgo of Park Oliwski
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · not documented; a mature specimen, likely planted when the park's dendrological garden was developed in the 19th or early 20th century · Oliwa
For about a week each autumn this tree empties itself. Ginkgos turn uniformly gold and then drop the whole crown almost at once, sometimes inside two days, and for that week the ground underneath it is the reason to come.
The rest of the year it is a straight, quiet tree with a trunk 201 centimetres round and 20 metres of height, standing in the corner of Park Oliwski that was worked up into a dendrological collection. Poland entered it on the central register of natural monuments on 15 March 1992 as number 833, the same day it registered the European larch and the Weymouth pine growing a few paces away.
Ginkgo biloba is the last species of an entire order of plants. Its relatives were widespread before flowering trees existed and then disappeared everywhere except a corner of China, and the species survives now largely because people kept planting it, which is exactly what happened here. Nobody wrote down when. The girth reads like a nineteenth or early twentieth century planting rather than anything ancient, but that is a judgement about a trunk, not a record, and we have found no document either way. If you know when this one went in, tell us.
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9
The Cucumber Magnolia of Park Oliwski
Cucumber Tree Magnolia (Magnolia acuminata) · not documented; an unusually large specimen of this species for the climate · Oliwa
Most people picture a magnolia as a garden shrub holding up pink goblets in April. This one is 19 metres tall with a trunk 271 centimetres round.
Magnolia acuminata is a forest tree from eastern North America, and it is called the cucumber tree for its unripe fruit, a knobbly green cylinder a few centimetres long that reddens through late summer. Its flowers are the anticlimax of the genus: greenish yellow, held high in the crown, easy to stand underneath and miss completely. What the species does instead is get big, and this specimen has done it a long way north of anywhere it grows wild.
It went onto Poland's register of natural monuments on 15 March 1992 as number 837. A second cucumber tree, 212 centimetres round, stands about 250 metres away in the same park, and the survey of Gdansk's protected trees picks out the tree magnolias of Park Oliwski, the ones past two metres of girth, as one of the collection's standouts. For a species that is only ever planted here as an ornamental, that is a real distinction.
Nobody has dated it. There is no planting record, and no growth rate published for the species at this latitude to work one out from. If you have found either, tell us.
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10
The Three-Trunked Katsura of Park Oliwski
Katsura (Cercidiphyllum japonicum) · not documented; likely a late-19th or early-20th-century planting, since the species only reached European gardens after 1865 · Oliwa
In October this tree smells of caramel. Katsura leaves give off a scent as they yellow and fall, variously described as burnt sugar, toffee or gingerbread, strong enough on a still afternoon that people look around for a bakery. It is one of the few trees you can find with your nose.
The rest of the year it is worth finding for its shape. A single katsura here has split into three trunks low down, measuring 168, 189 and 158 centimetres round, and carried all three to 25 metres. Poland registered it as a natural monument on 15 March 1992 under number 838, describing it in Polish as grujecznik japonski trojpienny: the three-trunked Japanese katsura. The register is not usually that literal, and in this case the description is all the recognition anybody needs.
There is a ceiling on how old it can be. Cercidiphyllum japonicum was unknown to Western collections until after 1865, so no katsura anywhere in Europe is much more than a century and a half old, whatever the trunks suggest. Nobody has dated this one and the register carries girths rather than birthdays. The smell, at least, arrives on schedule.
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11
The Giant Thuja of Park Oliwski
Western Red Cedar (Thuja plicata) · not documented; girth suggests a mature 19th or early-20th-century planting · Oliwa
Poland protects four trees on this spot as a single object. A western red cedar, two common yews and a Nootka cypress grow within a few metres of one another in the dendrological corner of Park Oliwski, and the register took all of them on 15 March 1992 under one number, 836, rather than four.
The cedar is the one to stand in front of. Its trunk is 219 centimetres round and it carries 23 metres of dense, drooping, scale-leaved foliage; Gdansk's survey of its protected trees singles out the giant thujas of Park Oliwski as one of the collection's standouts, and this is the one that clears two metres of girth. Its neighbours in the record are smaller: the yews at 148 and 104 centimetres, the Nootka cypress at 143.
Thuja plicata is not a European tree at all. It belongs to the wet Pacific coast of North America, from Alaska down to northern California, where on good ground it reaches heights and ages this specimen will never come near. Somebody brought it to a Baltic park and it took, which is most of what a dendrological collection was for.
Nobody recorded when that happened. The register carries a girth, a height and a date of protection, and no birthday. If you have found a planting record for this corner of the park, tell us.
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12
The Ivy Elm of Park Oliwski
European White Elm (Ulmus laevis) · roughly 150 to 250 years · Oliwa
Most of Europe's big elms are dead. Dutch elm disease killed them by the tens of millions across the twentieth century, which is why a European white elm with a trunk 420 centimetres round and a crown at 30 metres is now a genuinely rare thing to walk up to. This one stands by the pond in Park Oliwski and has been protected since 1 July 1988, which makes it one of the older entries on Gdansk's register.
It is not registered under its own name. Poland's entry, number 576, calls it wiaz z kwitnacym bluszczem pospolitym: an elm with flowering common ivy. The ivy going up the trunk is part of what is protected. Ivy only flowers once it has climbed high enough to reach real light, which takes decades, and when it does it flowers in autumn, weeks after everything else has finished, pulling wasps and late bees onto a tree nothing else is visiting. Standing under it in October you hear it before you work out what you are hearing.
Nobody has counted the rings. An elm of this girth is usually put somewhere between 150 and 250 years old, and that band comes from the trunk rather than from any document, so take it as the wide guess it is. What is not a guess is that the tree outlived the epidemic that took nearly every elm its size on the continent.
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