Vienna keeps its oldest trees on an official register: since 1936, remarkable specimens have qualified as Naturdenkmäler, natural monuments protected the same way a listed building is. That bureaucratic habit is why this city can name an exact protection date for almost every tree on this list, down to the day. The trees below range from a plane tree Mozart is said to have walked past on his way to piano lessons to a ginkgo planted beside a composer's statue in the city's first public park. All of them are free to see.
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写真：GuentherZ (CC BY 3.0)
1
The Cemetery Plane of Singerstraße
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 290 years · Innere Stadt, 1st district
This tree has been quietly absorbing a piece of iron fence for two and a half centuries. The plane in the Fähnrichhof, a courtyard just off Singerstraße in Vienna's old town, grew directly through part of the railing that once enclosed St Stephen's Cathedral's own graveyard, closed to burials in the 1730s. The fence is no longer visible today. Vienna's own natural monument record notes it as sealed inside the trunk by decades of callus growth, the tree's version of scar tissue closing over a wound. A 1987 expert assessment measured the trunk at two and a half metres around, the crown at ten metres across, and put the tree's age at more than 250 years even then, which makes it well past 280 today. It stands in a courtyard once attached to the Domherrenhof, the residence of St Stephen's cathedral canons, reachable on foot through a passage from Blutgasse that locals call a Durchhaus, one of the old town's many semi-hidden pedestrian shortcuts between streets. The glass door at the Blutgasse end is usually left open during the day. Almost nobody outside the neighbourhood knows this tree exists, let alone that it is quietly digesting a piece of ecclesiastical ironwork nobody has seen in living memory.
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写真：GuentherZ (CC BY 3.0)
2
The Ginkgo of the Schubert Monument
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · 125 years · Innere Stadt / Landstraße border, Stadtpark
Vienna's other great ginkgo does not get the attention Schönbrunn's does, despite standing a five minute walk from the cathedral. City councilman Heinrich Braun had it brought to Stadtpark and planted around 1900, decades after the species had become a fashionable import for European parks, and it now grows beside the marble statue of Franz Schubert unveiled here in 1872, close enough that photographs of one usually catch the edge of the other. Vienna declared it a protected natural monument on 3 July 1973, Naturdenkmal Nr. 569, on the grounds that a ginkgo this size is still a genuine rarity this far from its native range in China. Its own small plaque, bolted to the trunk, calls it by the old German name for the species: Fächerblätterbaum, the fan-leaf tree. Stadtpark itself was Vienna's first purpose-built public park, opened in 1862 along the Wien river specifically so the city's middle class would have somewhere to walk that was not a royal garden. The ginkgo has spent well over a century doing exactly that: watching Viennese office workers, tourists and dog walkers cross the park on their way to somewhere else, then turning, every autumn, the same uniform gold as its more famous cousin across town.
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3
The Chestnut Avenue of the Hauptallee
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · about 186 years, documented planted in 1840 · Leopoldstadt, 2nd district
Vienna's grandest avenue is older than the trees that define it by two centuries. The Hauptallee was cut through the Prater's floodplain forest in 1538, on the order of Emperor Ferdinand I, to connect the Augarten with the imperial hunting grounds, but the horse chestnuts that now line it in four to six dense rows came generations later. Vienna's own municipal tree registry documents the oldest surviving specimen, a 254cm-girth chestnut near Praterstern, as planted in 1840, a real, individually recorded tree rather than a rounded guess. Roughly 2,600 avenue trees run along the full 4.5 kilometre length, from Praterstern at one end to the Lusthaus, a former imperial hunting lodge, at the other, making this one of the longest tree-lined avenues in Europe. For a few weeks each spring the chestnuts turn the entire route white with candle-shaped blossom, an event Viennese joggers and cyclists plan routes around rather than merely notice. The avenue has hosted horse races, carriage parades, and, for decades, the finish straight of the Vienna City Marathon. Not every tree on the Hauptallee is old. Storms, disease, and simple traffic have taken their share over five centuries, and new chestnuts are replanted as older ones fail, which is exactly why this is a walk through a living tradition rather than a search for a single ancient trunk.
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写真：Wolfgang H. Wögerer, Wien, Austria (CC BY-SA 3.0)
4
The Ginkgo of Schönbrunn
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · 245 years · Hietzing, 13th district
This is one tree with two sexes. Ginkgos are either male or female, never both, except this one: a female branch was grafted onto it at some point in its life, so a single male tree now also drops the messy, strong-smelling seeds normally produced only by female ginkgos. It arrived in Vienna in 1781, imported through an English nursery only a few decades after the species reached Europe at all, and it is very likely the oldest ginkgo now growing in Austria. It stands in Schönbrunn's Botanical Garden, on the palace park's eastern side, its trunk grown to roughly five metres around and its crown to about twenty metres tall. Vienna listed it as a protected natural monument in 1939, one of the earliest ginkgos anywhere to receive that kind of formal status. It has outlived the empire that planted it and survived two world wars a few hundred metres from a palace that changed hands more than once, and each autumn it still does what ginkgos are famous for: every leaf on the tree turns gold and drops within days, all at once, rather than drifting down gradually like almost everything else in the park.
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写真：GuentherZ (CC BY 3.0)
5
The Mozart-Platane
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 245 years · Landstraße, 3rd district
A memorial stone at its base calls this tree the Jacquin-Platane, but almost nobody in Vienna uses that name. Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin planted it around 1780 as director of the university's Botanical Garden, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart walked past it often enough, on his way to piano lessons at Jacquin's house nearby, that the tree took his name instead. It has stood on Rennweg since before the French Revolution, and it has been protected as one of Vienna's first natural monuments since 1936, registered simply as Naturdenkmal Nr. 9. A property boundary shifted at some point in its life, and the tree now grows on the public sidewalk, just outside the fence of the Botanical Institute it once stood inside. Its trunk, roughly six metres around, has gone partially hollow with age, and Vienna's parks department now lists it as endangered. In 2009 the city closed Rennweg overnight and tested the tree's stability with rope winches, treating a quarter-millennium-old plane tree with the same seriousness as a structural inspection. It is around 245 years old now, close enough to Mozart's own lifetime that the story holds up better than most tree legends do.
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写真：GuentherZ (CC BY 3.0)
6
The Founding Plane of Rathauspark
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · disputed: 1783 by tradition, 1876 in the city register · Innere Stadt, 1st district
The oldest tree in front of Vienna's City Hall is older than the building itself by exactly one century. Two records disagree about this tree by ninety years. Tradition puts it in the ground in 1783, when the site was open land beyond the city. The city's own tree register says 1876, three years after the park was laid out, and gives that same year to every monument here, which is what a register writes down when a park is planted at once. Nobody has counted its rings. Construction of the neo-Gothic town hall did not start until 1872, and the park was landscaped around the new building only after that, which means this tree had already been growing for close to ninety years by the time the space around it became a park at all. It has since grown into a trunk six metres around and a crown thirty metres tall, big enough that Vienna's own tree registry lists it, under catalogue number 252, as Rathauspark's oldest specimen without qualification. It is one of three plane trees in the park with individual legal protection as natural monuments, granted in 1973. Office workers on lunch break, tourists cutting through on their way to the Burgtheater, and the occasional wedding photographer all pass beneath a canopy that was already mature when Mozart was writing his last symphonies, in a park that did not exist yet to contain it.
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写真：Michael Kranewitter (CC BY-SA 3.0 AT)
7
The Sisi-Platane of Volksgarten
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 200+ years · Innere Stadt, 1st district
Vienna named this plane tree after an empress who famously disliked Vienna. The Sisi-Platane stands near the fountain at the heart of the Volksgarten, close to the Theseus Temple, and at an estimated 200 years old it is the oldest tree in a garden that Empress Elisabeth, who gave the tree her nickname, mostly used as a shortcut on her way to somewhere else. She preferred riding and travelling to sitting still in Viennese gardens, but the name stuck anyway. The trunk now measures roughly three and a half metres around, and the crown spans a full twenty metres in every direction, wide enough to shade a large share of the garden's central lawn on a summer afternoon. Vienna placed it under legal protection in 1951 as Naturdenkmal Nr. 376, one of a small number of individually registered trees in the first district. Its exact age has not turned up in any planting record, only an estimate based on its size, so it should be read as approximate rather than precise. What nobody disputes is its rank: nothing else growing in the Volksgarten today is older, and few Viennese park benches offer a better patch of shade.
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写真：Clemens Mosch (CC BY-SA 4.0)
8
The Oak of the Sulzwiese
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · estimated 150-250 years · Leopoldstadt, 2nd district
Its crown alone covers more ground than most Viennese apartment buildings. The pedunculate oak of the Sulzwiese, a meadow in the Grüner Prater away from the funfair and the Ferris wheel, has a canopy that spreads roughly 45 metres across, wide enough that someone standing under one edge of it cannot see a person standing under the other through the branches. The trunk itself is a comparatively modest 4.28 metres around, which tells you this tree grew in the open, in full sun, with nothing crowding its sides, rather than competing for light in a forest the way most old oaks do. That kind of open-grown oak puts its energy into width rather than height, and the Sulzwiese oak is a textbook result: a low, spreading giant rather than a tall one. No planting record has surfaced to say exactly how old it is, so any figure here is an estimate rather than a fact, but a crown this size on an open-grown oak typically points to somewhere between 150 and 250 years, a wide range stated honestly rather than rounded to something tidier. Vienna registered it as Naturdenkmal Nr. 846, one of eighteen protected natural monuments in the Prater's home district of Leopoldstadt, and it remains one of the most photographed trees in the park precisely because its shape is so unusual.
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写真：ZavosBrachides (CC BY-SA 3.0)
9
The Giant Sequoias of Pötzleinsdorfer Schlosspark
Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · estimated 80-150 years · Währing, 18th district
Every giant sequoia growing in Europe today is, at most, about 170 years old, because the species was not seen by Europeans until 1852 and not exported until 1853. That upper limit makes the two giant sequoias flanking the main entrance to Pötzleinsdorfer Schlosspark impressive for what they are not: they cannot be nearly as old as the palace park around them, which the Geymüller banking family began landscaping in 1801, decades before anyone in Europe had seen a sequoia seed. They were planted later, sometime after 1853, as one of the many exotic imports that Vienna's wealthy families competed to add to their English-style gardens once the species became available, a horticultural fashion sometimes called Wellingtonia mania. Two smaller sequoias grow between the pair near the entrance, part of the same planting. The park itself, one of Vienna's largest and least manicured, is known for long open meadows dotted with individual specimen trees rather than dense woodland, and the sequoias are its most conspicuous residents: nothing else in the park comes close to their bulk or their soft, reddish, fibrous bark. No precise planting date or trunk measurement has surfaced for this specific pair, so their age here is bounded by what is known about the species rather than stated as documented fact.
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写真：Michael Kranewitter (CC BY-SA 3.0 AT)
10
The Twin Giants of Sternwartepark
Mixed species (Ginkgo and Giant Sequoia) · 100+ years · Währing, 18th district
Two trees, planted side by side, share a single protection order. In the Sternwartepark, in the shadow of Vienna's university observatory, a ginkgo and a giant sequoia grow close enough together that Vienna registered them as one natural monument in 2010, Naturdenkmal Nr. 817, rather than two. They make an odd pair. The ginkgo, a living fossil native to China, was already around a century old when it was surveyed, with a trunk 2.35 metres around and a height of 24 metres. Next to it stands a Californian giant sequoia that has grown taller, 27 metres, but leans noticeably as it climbs, its 3.75 metre trunk curving rather than running straight up the way most conifers do. Neither species is native within a continent of Vienna, and the two would never have met each other in the wild, yet here they have spent a century as neighbours a few streets from Türkenschanzpark, itself planted with exotic species through Vienna university's old botanical connections. The observatory nearby, the largest structurally closed telescope building in the world when it opened in 1879, gives the whole park its name. Astronomers looking skyward have had these two very different giants growing at ground level the entire time.
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11
The Lime of the Schönbornpark
Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) · 187 years, planted 1839 by the city's tree register · Josefstadt, 8th district
Vienna's tree registry lists nearly nine hundred trees in the eighth district and gives this one a girth of 489 centimetres, which makes it comfortably the thickest thing growing in Josefstadt. The lime stands beside the pond in Schönbornpark, the garden of the Palais Schönborn, and the city dates its planting to 1839. That is twenty-three years before the Schönborn family sold the grounds to the municipality and the private garden became a public park, so the tree spent its first two decades behind a wall, in a palace garden nobody was allowed into. The palace itself, built between 1706 and 1711 to a design by Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt, has housed the Volkskundemuseum since 1917, which means the lime now shades a lawn where people eat lunch between looking at Austrian farmhouse furniture. At 26 to 30 metres it is taller than the palace behind it. Large-leaved limes flower earlier than the small-leaved kind, usually the middle two weeks of June, and when this one goes off the whole park smells of it and the crown audibly hums. Bring something to sit on. The benches around the pond fill up fast on the first properly warm evening of the year, and locals know exactly which fortnight to come for.
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12
The Plane Outside the Grey House
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · about 200 years · Josefstadt, 8th district
There used to be two of them. Vienna protected a pair of oriental planes on Landesgerichtsstraße in July 1956, recording trunk girths of 2.1 and 3.6 metres, and today both the monument register and the city's tree catalogue find exactly one oriental plane on the entire street. The survivor is the bigger one, now 445 centimetres around and 21 to 25 metres tall, and its two record-keepers disagree pleasantly about its birthday: the protection decree guessed it was planted around 1835, the tree catalogue writes 1815. Either way it beat the building it stands in front of. The Landesgericht für Strafsachen, the grey slab of a criminal court Viennese people simply call the Graues Haus, went up between 1831 and 1839 on ground that had been the citizens' shooting range and, before that, the St Stephanus cemetery. So the plane was already rooted while the site was still a rifle range on the edge of town, decades before the city walls came down and the Ringstrasse was drawn. It has since spent nearly two centuries a few metres from the door people are led through on the worst day of their lives. Nobody planted it as a memorial to anything. It simply outlasted every use the ground has been put to.
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写真：Michael Kranewitter (CC BY-SA 3.0 AT)
13
The Fern-leaved Beech of the Rathauspark
Fern-leaved Beech (Fagus sylvatica 'Laciniata') · about 153 years, planted 1873 · Innere Stadt, 1st district
Four hundred and forty-nine trees are individually registered in the Rathauspark and this one has the thickest trunk of the lot, six metres around, beating the park's famous plane trees by a few centimetres. It is also the strangest looking. A fern-leaved beech is a cultivated freak of the common beech whose leaves come out shredded into narrow ribbons, so from a distance the canopy reads as feathery rather than solid, and up close you keep checking whether you are looking at a beech at all. Vienna gave it legal protection in July 1973, the same day it protected three of the park's planes. Its trunk is the reason to come. Rather than one clean column it goes up as a fused mass of grey limbs that split at head height and lean outward in every direction, with the roots buttressing out across bare earth where a century and a half of feet have worn the grass away. Generations of Viennese have carved initials into it, all healed over into pale scars. The park was laid out in 1873, which is also the year the city gives as this tree's planting, so it has stood in front of the town hall for as long as there has been a town hall to stand in front of.
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写真：Thomas Ledl (CC BY-SA 3.0 AT)
14
The Persian Ironwood of the Grete-Rehor-Park
Persian Ironwood (Parrotia persica) · estimated 85-110 years · Innere Stadt, 1st district
This tree is twice as wide as it is tall. The Persian ironwood on Schmerlingplatz stands between 6 and 10 metres high and throws a crown 16 to 18 metres across, which is what the species does when nobody crowds it: instead of a trunk it grows a low fused knot of leaning stems that peel in grey, green and fawn plates like a plane tree's, then spreads sideways until it makes its own room. The city measures the base at 460 centimetres around, an exceptional figure for a species most European gardens never get past arm's width. Vienna protected it on 5 November 1956, and the stated reason was not its age or size but simply its rarity. Parrotia persica grows wild only in the Caspian forests of northern Iran and Azerbaijan, and in the 1950s a full-grown one in a Vienna square was worth a legal decree. What it does in late October is the reason to walk over. The leaves do not turn a single colour, they turn several at once and unevenly, so one branch goes scarlet while the next is still green and a third has already reached amber, and the whole low dome ends up looking backlit even under grey sky. The small park around it, a wedge of grass beside the Justizpalast, was named in 2016 after Grete Rehor, the first woman to hold a ministry in Austria.
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15
The Caucasian Wingnut of the Stadtpark
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · about 105 years, planted 1921 · Innere Stadt, 1st district
Come in July and this tree is hung with several hundred green ropes. The Caucasian wingnut fruits in chains up to half a metre long, each one a string of little winged nutlets that dangle straight down from the branch tips and stay there, greening, then browning, into autumn. No other tree in the Stadtpark does anything remotely like it, and most people who stop have no idea what they are looking at. Vienna put it under protection on 16 December 1941, in the middle of a war, as Naturdenkmal Nr. 280. The city's tree catalogue dates it to 1921 and gives its trunk as 308 centimetres around under a crown 16 to 18 metres wide. It also lists two more wingnuts of exactly the same age within five metres, which is not an accident of record keeping: this species suckers hard from the root plate, sending up new stems around the parent until one tree slowly becomes a thicket of itself. The old bark helps you find it. Wingnut bark is deeply corded and ridged, closer to a very old ash than to the walnut it is related to, and this one carries its enamel monument plaque half swallowed by ivy about chest height. It stands near the Wien river, two minutes from the ginkgo by the Schubert monument.
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写真：Thomas Ledl (CC BY-SA 3.0 AT)
16
The Pagoda Tree of the Stadtpark
Japanese Pagoda Tree (Styphnolobium japonicum) · 166 years, planted 1860 by the city's tree register · Innere Stadt, 1st district
Vienna's tree catalogue dates this one to 1860, and the Stadtpark did not open until August 1862. Whichever way you read that, the pagoda tree was in the ground before the park was, either as one of the very first things planted while the Wien river bank was still a building site or as a tree the landscapers found there and kept. It has grown to 444 centimetres around and stands 21 to 25 metres, on a trunk that forks low and then leans away from itself in two directions at once, so it looks less like a park specimen than like something that had to negotiate for its light. Styphnolobium japonicum is the tree Chinese emperors were buried under and Beijing planted along its temple approaches, and it earns its place in a European park by flowering at the one time of year when almost nothing else does. Late July into August it covers itself in loose sprays of small cream pea-flowers, then drops them, and for a week the path underneath is pale with them. Vienna protected it on 16 December 1941 as Naturdenkmal Nr. 276, the same day it protected the wingnut a hundred and sixty metres away. Both are still here.
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写真：Haeferl (CC BY-SA 4.0)
17
The Judas Tree of the Altes AKH
Judas Tree (Cercis siliquastrum) · well over 100 years, possibly 18th century · Alsergrund, 9th district
This tree flowers straight out of its own trunk. In spring, before a single leaf opens, Cercis siliquastrum covers itself in rosy-pink flowers barely two centimetres across, and they push out not only from the twigs but from the branches and the old wood of the trunk itself. It is a habit called cauliflory, common in the tropics and close to unknown on a street in central Europe. Its age is a genuine argument. Vienna protected it on 14 February 1995 on the grounds that it was already well over a hundred years old, which puts a hard floor of roughly 130 years under it today. Local reporting adds that it was probably planted in the eighteenth century, along with the institute buildings around it, which would make it closer to 240. Nothing settles that, so the range stays wide. Even its monument number is disputed: most sources call it Nr. 762, while the city's own 2025 press release calls it Nr. 769. The courtyard was part of one of the most modern hospitals in the world when Joseph II opened the Allgemeines Krankenhaus in 1784, on ground that had held a poorhouse since 1693. The hospital moved out and the University of Vienna took the buildings in 1998, so the second courtyard now has cafe tables around it. The tree grows as ten old stems with young shoots between them, renewing itself indefinitely as long as nobody tidies it up.
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18
The Field Elm of Burggasse
Field Elm (Ulmus minor) · about 111 years, planted 1915 · Neubau, 7th district
Europe lost most of its large elms in the second half of the twentieth century, which is reason enough to look at a field elm planted in 1915 and still standing. Ulmus minor was the species Dutch elm disease hit hardest: a fungus carried tree to tree by bark beetles that killed the great majority of Europe's mature elms from the 1960s onward. No record says this particular tree survived a particular outbreak. It simply kept going while the species around it did not. It grows on the narrow green strip down the middle of Burggasse, between the roadway and a service lane, which is an odd address for a protected natural monument and is precisely why it earned the status. Vienna's tree catalogue gives the planting year as 1915, a trunk 290 centimetres around, a height of 16 to 20 metres and a crown almost as wide as the tree is tall. The city protected it on 8 August 2006 as Naturdenkmal Nr. 794, and the decree's stated reason is plain: its size, and what it does for the character of the street. Two city departments record it at two different addresses, one calling it Burggasse 26 and the other Burggasse 39. Only one field elm appears in the whole Neubau district list, so this is one tree with two addresses. Its crown is cut back regularly for the power lines and the traffic, so expect a working street tree rather than a park specimen.
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19
The Turkish Hazels of Resselpark
Turkish Hazel (Corylus colurna) · about 109 and 126 years, planted 1917 and 1900 · Wieden, 4th district
Vienna protected these two trees for looking alike. Naturdenkmal Nr. 545, granted on 25 April 1972, covers a pair of Turkish hazels standing opposite the main entrance of the Technical University, and the reason recorded for the designation is their uniform growth and their appearance as a pair, not anything about either tree on its own. They are not twins. The city tree catalogue dates one to 1900 and the other to 1917, seventeen years apart, with trunks of 281 and 237 centimetres, and they stand about thirty metres from each other in the same sightline. That they grew into a matched pair regardless says something about the species. Corylus colurna is the tree-sized hazel of the Balkans, Anatolia and the Caucasus, and it builds a stubbornly regular cone on one straight trunk, which is why cities plant it along streets and why these two arrived at the same silhouette from different decades. It is also why they are the oldest trees in this small park and still look like street furniture rather than veterans. Resselpark is named for Josef Ressel, who patented a screw propeller in 1827 and watched other people make it work. It lies between the Karlsplatz and the Karlskirche, so the hazels look straight at Fischer von Erlach's dome and its two carved columns, and the Secession building is five minutes west. Both trees stand on open public ground at any hour.
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20
The Twin Planes of Am Platz
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · roughly 290 years, disputed · Hietzing, 13th district
Two Oriental planes stand in front of the Hietzing parish church, and the district tells their story as a thank-offering for surviving the plague. By that account, published by the district office, Countess Scalquiogni, a lady-in-waiting at the Habsburg court, gave Hietzing three plane trees in 1732 in gratitude for coming through an epidemic. Two of the three are still here. In April 2020 the district called them 288 years old, which fits that date to the year.
Vienna's own tree cadastre disagrees, and not by a little. It records the same two trunks as planted in 1810 and 1860, which would make the younger of the pair a nineteenth century street tree rather than a Baroque gift. Both readings are on the record. The 1732 account is the more specific and comes with a name attached; the cadastre is the city's working inventory. Expect the truth to sit somewhere in that gap.
They measure about 4.2 metres around each and stand 13 metres apart, on a square that has been Hietzing's Sunday gathering place since the Middle Ages. Vienna protected the pair as a single natural monument, number 122, in March 1939.
In late February 2020 the storm named Yulia tore into both crowns. The district had them pruned back for safety and cabled, which is what the steel running through the canopy is holding together.
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21
The Oak of Schönbrunn's Botanical Garden
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · likely 200+ years, undocumented exactly · Hietzing, 13th district
In September 1941 three trees in one corner of Schönbrunn's botanical garden were put under protection. A survey of Vienna's natural monuments printed in 1949 went back through the list and marked one of them destroyed by war events, a Japanese pagoda tree that stood about thirty metres from here. This oak is one of the two that came through. The yew twelve metres away is the other.
No source will give it an age. The register recorded none in 1941 and has recorded none since, so what there is to go on is the trunk: 6.21 metres around, measured a metre off the ground. A tree that thick has been growing for centuries, but girth alone will not say how many and nobody has counted, so any single figure you see for this oak is somebody's estimate.
The ground explains the tree. This was the Habsburgs' own botanical garden, begun in the 1750s and stocked from imperial collecting expeditions, and Schönbrunn is federal property rather than municipal, which is why Vienna's city tree inventory has no record of this oak at all. The pedunculate oak was there as the native, the plainest thing in a garden full of imports.
Come in through the Hietzinger Tor. The botanical garden is free and open daily; the Palm House and the Gloriette a short walk away are separate tickets and a different afternoon.
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22
The Yew of Schönbrunn's Botanical Garden
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · not documented · Hietzing, 13th district
Nobody has measured this tree. There is no girth on file, no height, no age and no photograph in the usual archives. What exists is a line in Vienna's register of natural monuments, number 181, protected on 4 September 1941, and a printed survey from 1949 that lists it again with nothing written beside it.
That blank is the point. The same 1949 survey marks the tree that stood about thirty metres away, a Japanese pagoda tree carrying number 179, as destroyed by war events. This yew and the oak twelve metres from it carry no such note, which is the nearest thing to a wartime health certificate a tree can hold.
Yews reward exactly this kind of neglect. Taxus baccata grows slowly, tolerates deep shade and hard cutting, and can carry on for centuries without ever getting spectacular enough to attract a tape measure, which is roughly how a protected tree spends eighty-five years on a government list without acquiring a single number.
So this one comes with an honest hole in it. It stands in the corner of Schönbrunn's botanical garden near the Hietzinger Tor, it has been there since before the bombing, and it looks the same in February as it does in July, which is what a yew is for. The garden itself is free and open daily. If you get a tape around it, tell us what it says.
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写真：Flora_DUMO (CC BY)
23
The Plane of Dr. Karl Lueger-Platz
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · about 100 years · Innere Stadt, 1st district
Planted in 1928, and already four metres thirty-four around the trunk. That is what a London plane does with a century and enough root room, and it is why people looking at a tree like this guess two or three hundred years. Vienna's tree cadastre has the planting year written down, which ends the guessing before it starts.
The city protects it as a Naturdenkmal, a natural monument, which for a street tree means it is not going to be removed for roadworks or sightlines. It stands on the Ring between Stubentor and the Stadtpark, on a stretch that otherwise runs the better part of a kilometre without a protected tree, so it fills a real gap for anyone walking the Ring for its trees rather than its buildings.
The square carries the name of Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910, whose antisemitic politics have kept that name under public argument in the city for decades and keep it there now. The tree went into the ground eighteen years after he left office. It is the address you will be looking for.
Both records of this tree, the monument register and the cadastre, are Vienna's own. They agree with each other, which is not the same as two independent sources, and the trunk figure is a measurement rather than an estimate.
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24
The Oak of Grimmelshausengasse
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · not documented · Landstraße, 3rd district
Vienna protects this oak as a natural monument and has published almost nothing else about it. No planting year, no trunk measurement, no entry in the city's tree cadastre, which lists Vienna's street and park trees by the hundred thousand. There is a register line saying the tree is protected, and there is the tree.
Better to say that plainly than to fill it in. A pedunculate oak in the third district is unusual on its own account: Vienna's streets were planted with planes, limes and maples, species that tolerate a pavement, while Quercus robur is a tree of heavy field soil and river meadow and rarely gets a city street to itself. This one stands on Grimmelshausengasse, a short residential road in Landstrasse, roughly midway between the Stadtpark and Rennweg, and somebody with the authority to do it decided it was worth protecting.
The street is named after Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, who published Simplicissimus in 1668, drawing on his own childhood in the Thirty Years War, and produced one of the first great novels in German and still one of the bleakest. The oak is nowhere near that old. Nothing at all says how old it is, which is why the age here is empty rather than approximate. Go for the tree, not for the paperwork.
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写真：GuentherZ (CC BY 3.0)
25
The Second Plane of Rathauspark
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 150 years · Rathauspark, Innere Stadt
Vienna's tree register says this plane was planted in 1873. It gives that same year to every protected tree in the Rathauspark, and 1873 is when the park itself was laid out around the new town hall. That is what a register writes down when a whole park goes in at once, so the date says more about the city's paperwork than about this tree. Several of the park's trees arrived as mature stock, already grown on the day they were planted. The honest answer on age is a band rather than a year, somewhere between a century and 160 years, and nobody has counted the rings.
The trunk has been measured, and it comes to 5.97 metres around, within a few centimetres of the thickest in the park. Vienna gave it individual legal protection as a natural monument in 1973, one of three planes here to get it.
Even at the low end of that range it has stood through the annexation of 1938, the war, and the ten years of four-power occupation that followed, all of it playing out around the building it faces. The famous plane is at the front of the park with a legend and a disputed 1783 date attached to it. This one is at the north end doing the same work with none of the attention, a mottled grey column splitting into heavy limbs under a crown wide enough to shade that corner on its own.
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写真：HeinzLW (CC BY-SA 3.0 at)
26
The Plane of Hügelgasse
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · not documented · Unter St. Veit, Hietzing
Most of the protected trees in this corner of Vienna stand in private courtyards. This one stands on the pavement. Hietzing's list of natural monuments reads largely as addresses with "im Hof" after them, in the courtyard, behind a gate somebody else controls. The entry for this plane says "Hügelgasse, vor Nr. 7", in front of house number 7, which is the difference between a tree you can read about and a tree you can put your hand on.
It is not the biggest plane in Vienna and does not pretend to be. The trunk measures 2.2 metres around. What it has is a crown 16 metres across on an 18 metre frame, which on a narrow residential street means it covers the road, both pavements and the fronts of the houses on either side. In summer the whole block sits under it.
Vienna entered it on the register of natural monuments on 17 January 1955, four months before the State Treaty ended the four-power occupation of the country. It has held the same patch of pavement in Unter St. Veit, the villa quarter west of Schönbrunn, ever since.
Nobody has put an age on it. The register carries its height, its girth and the day it was protected, and nothing at all about when it went into the ground. If you know, tell us.
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27
The Plane of Alser Straße
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · about 130 years · Alsergrund
A protected plane on Alser Strasse has stood for about a century and a half without ever making it into the walk Vienna's other planes did. The city's tree register puts its planting at 1894 and its trunk at 3.15 metres around, modest next to the giants of the Rathauspark a few stops away but enough on its own to earn the tree individual legal protection.
Alsergrund is the district built around Vienna's old General Hospital, and this stretch of Alser Strasse runs past the hospital's former grounds, now the University of Vienna's main campus. Most of the city's protected trees cluster inside the Ringstrasse parks a kilometre south. This one stands alone on an ordinary street, marked out only by being larger than a street tree here is expected to get.
It grows on the public footpath, a short walk from the U6 station that shares the street's name. The register gives no reason beyond its own measurements: no legend, no named planter, just a plane that outgrew its neighbours and got a law written around it.
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写真：GuentherZ (CC BY 3.0)
28
The Third Plane of Rathauspark
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · about 153 years, planted 1873 · Innere Stadt, 1st district
Rathauspark's plane trees carry three separate protection orders, all granted the same day in 1973, and this is the last of the set to make it onto this page. The first two already here, one with a six-metre trunk and a rumoured planting year of 1783, the other just under six metres round, get the story so far. This one is smaller, 526 centimetres, but belongs to exactly the same legal designation and stands only 55 metres from the second, close enough that a single stop in the park now takes in all three.
Vienna's own tree register gives every protected tree in Rathauspark the same planting year, 1873, the year the park itself was laid out around the new town hall. That is a blanket date rather than a measurement, the kind a register writes when a whole park goes in at once, so read the resulting age, around a century and a half, as an estimate rather than a count of rings.
It stands a three-minute walk from the Rathaus U-Bahn stop, free and open at any time, on the same lawn as its two sibling planes and the park's fern-leaved beech, which between them make Rathauspark one of the densest single stops on this whole page.
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29
The Black Pine of Ebner-Eschenbach-Park
Austrian Pine (Pinus nigra) · not documented; protected as a natural monument since 1942 · Wahring, 18th district
Ebner-Eschenbach-Park takes its name from Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, the Austrian writer whose village stories and epigrams made her one of the most important German-language writers of her era, and this Austrian pine has stood on the park's lawn for longer than the park has carried her name. Vienna protected the tree as a natural monument in 1942, citing its size and its role in the park's landscape, but nobody has published a girth, a height or a planting year for it since, an unusually thin record for a tree the city thought worth protecting outright.
Austrian pine, Pinus nigra, is native to the mountains ringing the Mediterranean and was planted across Vienna's parks through the nineteenth century for its tolerance of poor, dry soil, exactly the conditions of ground that had recently been fields rather than forest. This one has had eight decades of legal protection and, going by the timing of that 1942 order, considerably longer than that actually growing.
The park itself is small, about 6,200 square metres, bordered by Klostergasse and three other streets in the Cottage district of Wahring, open at all times with playgrounds and lawns around it. It sits roughly 850 metres from the ginkgo and giant sequoia already published at Sternwartepark, close enough to walk between the two on the same outing.
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30
The Sessile Oak of Belvedereallee
Sessile Oak (Quercus petraea) · not documented · Prater, Leopoldstadt, 2nd district
This sessile oak stands on Belvedereallee, a quieter stretch of the Prater than the chestnut-lined Hauptallee that gets all the postcards, in what is left of the floodplain forest that covered this ground before Emperor Ferdinand I ordered the first avenue cut through it in 1538. Vienna protected the tree as a natural monument in 2009, recording a trunk 4.5 metres round at chest height and a crown spreading close to 29 metres, big enough that Naturdenkmal Nr. 818 reads more like a description of a small wood than a single specimen.
Nobody has published an age for it, and this pass has not guessed one: sessile oaks growing wild in a remnant floodplain forest do not follow the growth-rate tables a planted park tree does, so a girth-based estimate here would be a guess dressed as a number rather than the honest gap it actually is.
It stands roughly 1.8 kilometres from the Hauptallee chestnuts, deep enough into the Prater that reaching it means committing to the park rather than passing through it: a 45-minute walk from Praterstern, or a shorter bus ride to the Freudenau or Lusthaus stops nearby. Free, open at all times, no ticket and no gate.
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31
The Elder Kugeltrompetenbaum of Schrankgasse
Southern Catalpa (Catalpa bignonioides) · About 49 years, planted 1977 · Neubau
Vienna's tree register lists this catalpa as a Kugeltrompetenbaum, a ball trumpet tree, and the name is the whole shape of it: a standard trunk topped with a dense, perfectly round crown that never happens by accident. Catalpa bignonioides 'Nana' is a dwarf cultivar, grafted rather than grown from seed, and left alone it would form nothing like a sphere. The roundness is decades of pruning holding a shape somebody chose on purpose.
The city's Baumkataster dates this one to 1977, which makes it not far off fifty years old, with a trunk 117 centimetres round, modest for a catalpa but ordinary for a cultivar bred to stay small. It grows on Schrankgasse in Neubau, Vienna's 7th district, a short walk from the inner Ring, one of two ball headed catalpas standing together at the same address.
The ordinary Southern Catalpa is a big, loose limbed tree known for coming into leaf absurdly late and for the thin bean-like pods that give it the name Indian bean tree. This is the same species wearing a haircut. The leaves and the flowers, when they come, belong to the same plant, just carried on a crown somebody has kept a sphere for half a century.
Single-sourced on the city's own tree register; no independent account of this specific tree has turned up yet.
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32
The Younger Kugeltrompetenbaum of Schrankgasse
Southern Catalpa (Catalpa bignonioides) · About 10 years, planted 2016 · Neubau
Its neighbour a few metres away has had fifty years to grow into its shape. This one has had ten, and it shows: a trunk 37 centimetres round against the older tree's 117, both recorded on the same Baumkataster page for Schrankgasse in Neubau.
Vienna planted this second ball headed catalpa here in 2016, an ordinary piece of municipal tree planting, except that it leaves a pair of the same cultivar standing together at two very different ages, close enough to compare by eye. Catalpa bignonioides 'Nana' is grafted onto a standard trunk and pruned into a dense globe that the wild form of the species never makes on its own. Nurseries sell the young graft as an already-finished shape, and the city's job afterward is mostly keeping it that way.
It will be decades before this one closes the gap with its older neighbour, if it ever does, since a Kugelbaum's ceiling is set at the nursery more than in the ground. For now it is the smaller half of a small, tidy pair on an ordinary Vienna street, worth a look precisely because the older tree beside it shows what fifty more years does to the same shape.
Register-only source, like its neighbour; nothing else has been found about it yet.
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