Warsaw rebuilt itself almost entirely after 1945, which is the quiet reason so few of its trees are genuinely old: whatever grew here before the war mostly burned with everything else. What survived instead carries weight beyond its years. A poplar stood inside a 1939 barricade and later grew beside a wartime transit camp. An oak marks the one building left around Janusz Korczak's orphanage. Royal parks add two more: a pair of oaks in the king's own Lazienki garden, and a lime named for the king who built Wilanow.
0 / 39 Warsawで訪れた数
1
Dab Mieszko I (King Mieszko I's Oak)
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 600-640 years · Ursynow
Warsaw's oldest tree survived six centuries of Polish history only to be set on fire by a person, not a storm, in June 2019. The oak, named for Poland's first recorded ruler though it began growing roughly two and a half centuries after his death around 992, stands at the edge of Natolin Forest on the city's southern edge, one of the last fragments of the wild Mazovian woodland that once covered this ground before Warsaw existed at all. Most of its crown has died back over the decades; steel cables and supports now hold the one thick surviving branch upright, and a cavity in the trunk has been filled with brick and cement, an old-fashioned repair meant to keep vandals and rot out rather than to look convincing. The arson attack in 2019 might have finished a lesser tree; this one produced leaves again the following spring. Its exact age has shifted across different surveys and plaques over the decades, estimates ranging from roughly 600 to 640 years depending on which measurement is cited, and an older on-site plaque is now known to have understated it. Whatever the precise figure, it remains the region's oldest documented oak and the clearest living link this city has to the forest it was built on top of.
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写真：Panek (CC BY-SA 3.0)
2
The Poplar of the Defenders
Canadian Poplar (Populus x canadensis) · about 99 years · Ochota
A mass grave was reportedly dug beneath this tree in August 1944, according to testimony from survivors of the transit camp that once stood around it. The poplar was already mature by then, planted in the mid-1920s in what was still open ground on Warsaw's western edge, and stood inside the barricaded defense line that Polish forces held here during the September 1939 siege of the city, growing up alongside genuine combat rather than merely outliving it at a distance. Five years later the same patch of ground became Zieleniak, a market square the Germans converted into a transit camp for tens of thousands of Ochota residents rounded up during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, a place survivors would later describe as a site of mass killing before deportation. Remains were exhumed from beneath the poplar after the war ended. None of that history shows on the tree itself today: at roughly 25 metres tall with a 453-centimetre trunk, it was named Warsaw's Tree of the Year in 2025 and reached the national final the following year, recognised now for its size and condition rather than for what the ground beneath it once held. The Barykada Wrzesnia monument stands beside it, the closest thing the site has to an explanation.
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写真：Panek (CC BY-SA 4.0)
3
Dr Korczak's Oak
Hungarian Oak (Quercus frainetto) · not documented · Wola
Janusz Korczak ran his orphanage from this corner for 29 years, until German soldiers marched him and roughly 200 children from the building to a train bound for Treblinka in August 1942, where all were murdered. He was offered a chance to walk away alone, by then already a well-known pediatrician and radio personality; he refused, choosing to stay with the children rather than abandon them, and that refusal is most of why his name is still known today far beyond Poland. The orphanage building itself, designed in 1911 for the Jewish charity Pomoc dla Sierot and completed the following year, is the only structure on this stretch of what was then Krochmalna Street to survive the district's wartime destruction; everything burned around it, then everything else standing was cleared after the war, leaving Korczak's building alone on ground later renamed Jaktorowska Street in 1970. The Hungarian oak growing at its corner, protected as one of Warsaw's natural monuments and formally named for Korczak, stands roughly 22 metres tall with a trunk 440 centimetres around. No record fixes exactly when it was planted, so it may or may not have already stood here while the orphanage still operated, but it has grown up beside the one building in the neighbourhood old enough to remember.
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4
Ciechomski's Pear
European Pear (Pyrus communis) · disputed, possibly younger than the 1870 legend claims · Stary Mokotow
A pear tree is a strange choice for a memorial, which is exactly why this one has stayed interesting long after the man it supposedly honours. Walenty Ciechomski was the last soltys, the village administrator, of Mokotow before the settlement was absorbed into Warsaw, and a veteran of the failed 1863 uprising against Russian rule; his gravestone at Sluzew cemetery still identifies him by that title alone. Local tradition holds that the pear was planted in 1870 to mark his settling on this corner, and the story has been repeated long enough to earn the tree informal protected status under his name. Historians examining the claim more recently have pushed back on most of it: a pear is an unusual and impractical species to plant as a personal memorial, the tree's apparent age does not obviously match an 1870 planting, and the likelier explanation is that it simply seeded itself on the corner sometime later, with Ciechomski's name attached to it afterward rather than at the root. Nobody disputes that Ciechomski himself was real, or that he fought in an uprising that cost Poland dearly and gained it nothing immediate. What is genuinely uncertain is whether this particular tree has anything to do with him at all, and this entry says so rather than repeating the tidier version of the story.
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5
The Royal Oaks of Lazienki
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · about 200 years · Srodmiescie (Lazienki Krolewskie)
For almost two centuries, two pedunculate oaks have grown side by side in the Romantic Garden of Lazienki Krolewskie, the park Poland's last king built for himself in the 18th century. The palace museum's own page on the park's oldest trees states it plainly: both oaks measure 450 centimetres round and 28 metres tall, and both hold protected natural-monument status. That girth on a pedunculate oak points to real age, roughly two hundred years, old enough that the pair were already substantial trees when Poland was partitioned off the map of Europe entirely, decades before the country existed again to protect them. Lazienki is the most visited royal park in the country, its lake, palace and open-air theatre drawing crowds who mostly walk past two more oaks without a glance. These stand near the New Orangery, on the western side of the path called Chinska Droga, close enough together that a visitor can take in both in one stop. The garden itself is free every day, no ticket needed beyond the museum buildings and the odd ticketed pavilion, making this the easiest stop on the whole Warsaw list to fold into an ordinary afternoon in the park.
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6
King Jan's Linden
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · not documented · Wilanow
Local and museum tradition names this lime for King Jan III Sobieski, who built Wilanow Palace in the late 17th century and is documented, in general accounts of the gardens, as having planted lindens on the grounds himself. No source ties this specific tree to that planting, so its age stays undocumented here rather than borrowed from a king's biography, but the name has stuck regardless, one linden singled out among the palace's roughly two dozen protected monument trees. Wilanow's own inventory of its monument trees records 27 of 28 as living in good condition, with only a single dead specimen elsewhere in the gardens, its crown already removed, nothing like the healthy tree this one is described as. It grows on the south side of the main avenue leading up to the palace, close enough to the approach that anyone walking in sees it before they see the building. Wilanow is Warsaw's grandest surviving baroque residence, spared the destruction that levelled most of the city in 1944, and its gardens charge an entry fee, a rare exception among the free public parks the rest of this page favours.
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7
Niemcewicz's Walnut
Black Walnut (Juglans nigra) · not documented · Ursynow
A black walnut, a species more at home on the eastern seaboard of North America, grows by a Polish palace named for a man who spent time in exile there. Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, writer, playwright and a companion of Tadeusz Kosciuszko through Poland's failed 18th century uprisings, owned this estate from 1822 and built a library on it; the poet Juliusz Slowacki visited in 1830 and admired what he found. Polish Wikipedia's own article on the palace, citing Warsaw city hall's register of natural monuments, confirms the walnut by name as a protected specimen, and a 2023 photograph on Wikimedia Commons shows it still standing that year. No source dates its planting to Niemcewicz's own tenure, so this page states the naming rather than inventing a birth year to match it. The building passed through several owners after him and has belonged to Warsaw's agricultural university since 1956, its grounds closed to outsiders for decades until the terraced garden behind the palace reopened to the public in 2025, free, after nine years of local campaigning. The tree that outlasted every one of those owners is now something almost nobody who planted it could have counted on: visible again.
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8
The Szustra Oaks
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · not documented · Mokotow (Park Morskie Oko)
Five pedunculate oaks stand together near Palac Szustra, the neoclassical villa at the heart of Park Morskie Oko, registered as one natural monument in 1978. Princess Izabela Lubomirska commissioned the palace and its grounds in the 1770s, designed by the architects Szymon Boguslaw Zug and Efraim Szreger; the estate passed to Anna Potocka in 1820, and in 1845 the banker Franciszek Szuster bought it and opened the lower part of the grounds to the public as a promenade, which is where the district gets its name. The palace burned during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and was rebuilt after the war. Warsaw's own environmental department lists a pedunculate oak next to the palace among the park's protected natural monuments, though the register gives no age or measurements for any of the five, only their 1978 designation date. Park Morskie Oko, also called Park Promenada-Morskie Oko, is one of Mokotow's most visited green spaces, its ponds and paths busy on any warm weekend, and the oaks stand a short walk from the palace steps, easy to overlook next to a building with so much of its own history on display. Nobody has measured them yet: if you know how old they are, this is the page to tell us on.
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9
The SGGW Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · not documented · Mokotow (Stary Mokotow)
An oak stands on Aleja Niepodleglosci, on the edge of what was once the main campus of SGGW, the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. The school received this land in 1923, carved from the old Pola Mokotowskie exercise fields, and spent the interwar years raising pavilions, a library and student housing on the site. In 1956 Warsaw swapped that land for territory further south in Ursynow, and SGGW has been based there ever since; nothing agricultural remains in Mokotow except this avenue and its name. The oak was declared a protected natural monument in 1974, by which point the university it once fronted had already left the neighbourhood behind. No source beyond the city's own register of protected trees has produced an age or a girth for it, so both stay open questions, exactly the kind a passer-by with a tape measure could close in a minute. Aleja Niepodleglosci is a wide public avenue, walked and cycled every day, with no gate anywhere near the tree and nothing to buy a ticket for. It is easy to find and, once you know which side of the street to look on, impossible to miss.
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10
The Ginkgo of the Botanical Garden
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · about 200 years (planted 1824) · Srodmiescie
The Warsaw University Botanical Garden protects twenty three trees as natural monuments under one legal designation from 1974, and this ginkgo is one of them, planted in 1824 in a garden that had already existed for six years by then. Ginkgo biloba had barely reached European gardens a generation earlier, brought from China as a curiosity that turned out to outlive nearly everything planted around it, and this tree has now stood through two centuries of a garden that itself survived the war that flattened most of the city around it.
It shares its 1974 designation with two common beeches elsewhere in the garden, and one of those beeches was blown down by wind in 2020, according to a news report at the time. That loss does not touch this ginkgo, a separate tree under the same paperwork, but it is a reminder that a shared designation protects individuals, not a group's survival as a whole.
No girth or height has been recorded for it in what is available so far, unusual for a tree this documented. It stands a few hundred metres from the Royal Oaks of Lazienki, close enough to fold into the same walk through central Warsaw's parks. The garden charges admission and closes its outdoor grounds over winter, opening again each March.
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11
The Maple and Elm of the Botanical Garden Gate
Norway Maple and European White Elm (Acer platanoides and Ulmus laevis) · Srodmiescie
A maple and an elm share one protection order at the vehicle gate of Warsaw University's Botanical Garden, designated together in 1988 rather than as two separate trees. They stand close enough to touch, sixty metres from the garden's famous 1824 ginkgo, at the entrance most visitors walk straight past on their way to the more famous specimen.
Acer platanoides, the Norway maple, is common enough across the city that Warsaw plants it as an ordinary street tree; what earns this specimen its own designation is simply standing at this gate long enough to outgrow the ordinary. Ulmus laevis, the European white elm, is a rarer thing to see reach old age anywhere in Europe: Dutch elm disease has killed most mature elms on the continent since the 1970s, and a surviving specimen this size is itself a small piece of evidence about which trees a city's beetles never quite reached.
Both stand inside the garden's grounds on Aleje Ujazdowskie, so the ticket that gets a visitor to the ginkgo gets them here first.
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12
The Columnar Oaks of the Observatory Entrance
Pedunculate Oak, columnar form (Quercus robur 'Fastigiata') · Srodmiescie
Two columnar oaks stand either side of the entrance nearest the garden's astronomical observatory, upright and narrow in a way ordinary pedunculate oaks never grow on their own: Quercus robur 'Fastigiata' is a cultivated form, bred to stay compact rather than spread the wide crown the species is known for. Warsaw designated the pair as protected natural monuments only in October 2024, one of the university garden's newest additions to a collection that also protects trees three centuries older.
The two are individually measured rather than treated as a single unit: one stands 19 metres tall with a trunk 335 centimetres round, the other 20 metres and 345 centimetres, close enough in size to read as a matched pair from the path but genuinely two different trees with two different numbers.
They stand about fifty metres from the garden's celebrated 1824 ginkgo, the same stop on the same visit, though a Warsaw institution's habit of taking its oldest trees seriously by cataloguing its youngest as well is the more unusual thing about them.
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13
The Puławska Street Pear
European Pear (Pyrus communis) · roughly 50 to 125 years, judged from a trunk 1.53 m round · Mokotów
Warsaw protects a pear tree that grows out of a pavement. It stands at ul. Pulawska 8a in Mokotow, on one of the city's main southern arteries, set in the sidewalk itself rather than behind any wall or railing, and the national register of natural monuments has listed it since 12 December 2001. A pear is a domestic fruit tree. It belongs to gardens and orchards, and how this one came to be standing in front of four lanes of traffic is not recorded anywhere. Mokotow is unusual in carrying two protected pears at once: this one, and Ciechomski's a kilometre to the south, whose supposed origin story historians have spent years picking apart.
Nobody has dated this tree. The register gives the year it was protected and nothing about the tree's own years, and Wikidata lists it at 11 metres tall with a trunk 153 centimetres round, both figures carrying no source attached to them at all, which makes them a starting point rather than a measurement. The most recent hard proof it is standing is a photograph taken on the pavement beside it in May 2021. If you have a planting date, or a tape measure and five minutes, tell us and the numbers go on the page.
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14
The Sophora of Aleja Niepodległości
Japanese Pagoda Tree (Styphnolobium japonicum) · Mokotów
This tree stands in front of a park nobody is allowed to enter. Behind it, on the far side of a fence on Aleja Niepodleglosci, lies Park SGGW, the grounds of the Warsaw University of Life Sciences, shut to the public since the university moved south to Ursynow and still shut today, with Mokotow residents publicly campaigning to have it opened. The pagoda tree is on the useful side of the fence, on the open pavement of the avenue, which is the only reason it appears here at all.
Poland's register of natural monuments has protected it since 22 October 1976 and cannot quite settle on what to call it: the paperwork carries both sofora chinska and sofora japonska, Chinese sophora and Japanese sophora. Chinese is the accurate half. The species is native to China and took its Japanese name from the cultivated trees Europeans met first, in Japan.
No source found so far gives an age or a girth, which leaves the two things people usually ask about entirely open; if you know either, tell us. What is not in doubt is the timing. It flowers cream in August, several weeks after almost everything else in Warsaw has finished, and drops the petals on the pavement underneath. The SGGW Oak stands 85 metres away, on the other side of the avenue.
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15
The Lime of Park Morskie Oko
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · Mokotów
Warsaw has protected this lime since 27 December 1990 and has never written down exactly where it is. The register gives its address as the corner of ul. Promenady and ul. Belwederska, which is a junction at the edge of the park rather than a place inside it, and the city's own parks department gets no closer: its guide to Park Promenada-Morskie Oko says only that a monument small-leaved lime grows near the pond. So the pin here marks the way in, not the trunk. Come in from Belwederska, keep the water on your side and look for the big lime above the bank; the hunt takes a few minutes and the park is worth them.
The ground it grows on was Princess Izabela Lubomirska's private garden in the 1770s and only became a public one in 1845, when the banker Franciszek Szuster bought the estate and opened its lower half as a promenade, which is where the district's Promenada takes its name. The lime shares the park with five protected oaks by Palac Szustra, higher up the slope.
No age and no girth have been recorded for it by anyone. Late June and July are when it pays for the walk regardless: the flowers open small and yellow-green, and the smell reaches much further than the tree looks capable of.
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16
The Grey Poplar of Madalinskiego
Gray Poplar (Populus canescens) · Mokotow
Poland protects this tree by name and by number. It holds an entry in the national register of natural monuments, PL.ZIPOP.1393.PP.1465011.3363, granted on 10 October 2012, and it grows on a pavement corner where Madalinskiego meets Kazimierzowska, between parked cars and a pedestrian crossing.
The designation came with a survey, which is the useful part: 21 metres tall, 3.58 metres round the trunk. Populus canescens is a natural cross between white poplar and aspen, its leaves felted grey underneath and hung so loosely that the whole crown changes shade when a gust comes down the street. It also grows fast, which is why a trunk that size is not the proof of great age it would be on an oak.
Nobody has dated this one, and in Mokotow that gap has a particular shape. The obvious question about any big tree in this district is whether it was standing through the 1944 uprising and the demolition that followed, and none of the sources answer it. We are not going to guess. If you know when it went in, tell us.
It is a walk of five to ten minutes from the oaks of Park Morskie Oko and the old pear on Pulawska, which makes it something to add to a Mokotow afternoon rather than a trip of its own.
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17
The Chestnut of Pulawska and Merliniego
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · Mokotow
This chestnut has outlasted the government that protected it. Poland listed it as a natural monument on 28 December 1988, ten months before the Round Table talks that ended communist rule, and it has stood through everything since on an ordinary pavement corner where ulica Pulawska meets ulica Merliniego in Mokotow.
Aesculus hippocastanum is not native to Poland. It came from the mountains of the Balkans by way of Vienna's gardens in the sixteenth century and spread across Central Europe as a street and park tree, valued for shade rather than for age, which makes a chestnut still standing at a road junction after decades of protection worth noticing. In May its whole crown lights up with upright white flower spikes, candles rising above the leaves, visible from the traffic waiting at the corner.
The register that protects it gives no age and no girth, only the date it was designated and the coordinates of the corner. Two more searches this year turned up nothing beyond the same official listing. If you know how old this tree really is, or have ever measured its trunk, tell us; right now the record only says it has stood, protected, since before Poland's own transition away from communist rule.
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写真：Panek (CC BY-SA 4.0)
18
The Karol Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · Żoliborz
Warsaw's register of natural monuments gives this oak a first name. Karol is a pedunculate oak of 24 metres, and it is not a park tree: it grows on the pavement of ul. Popiełuszki in Żoliborz, four or five kilometres north of the centre.
The state protected it on 22 October 1982, registered on its own rather than as one of a group, which means the monument is this single tree and nothing around it. More than forty years later it is still standing on the same stretch of pavement.
Get the address right when you go. Number 15 holds two protected oaks. The public nursery at that address has its own, entered in the register separately and never given a name, so the pair are easy to mix up on the ground. Karol is the one with the name; its neighbour carries only a code.
The height is on record and almost nothing else is. No published source we could find gives a girth or an age, which for a named oak on a Warsaw street is a strange gap. If you have put a tape measure around it, or you know when it was planted, tell us.
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19
The Oak of Palac Szustra
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · Mokotow (Park Morskie Oko)
Warsaw's register gives this oak a date five years older than its five famous neighbours. The Szustra Oaks, a group of five pedunculate oaks registered together in 1978, stand right beside Palac Szustra in Park Morskie Oko. This one, thirty metres further east, was designated on its own in 1973, which makes it the earliest protected tree found in the whole park, and yet it has no name of its own beyond a line in a register.
Why it was split out from a group registration nobody has explained. It may simply have been protected first, alone, before somebody later decided the palace's other five oaks deserved the same status as a set. Whatever the reason, the city treats it as a genuinely separate monument, with its own designation number rather than a line inside the Szustra group's listing.
Nobody has measured its girth or estimated its age, only recorded that it stands and that it is protected. A photograph taken in 2022 shows it in leaf at the stated spot, thirty metres from the palace, the most recent confirmation this pass could find that the earliest-registered tree in Park Morskie Oko is still there. If you know its age or have stood beside it, tell us: the reader is the one most likely to fill in what the register left out.
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写真：Panek (CC BY-SA 3.0 pl)
20
The Oak of Skwer Ziemi Aniolow
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · not documented · Ochota
Warsaw's natural monument register measures this oak three times over. It is a multi-stemmed pedunculate oak, and the paperwork that protected it on 8 October 2001 records three girths rising from one base: 203, 164 and 180 centimetres. There is no single clean trunk here to put your arms around. What stands on the lawn is one tree behaving like a small grove, 23 metres to the top of it.
Its address is a piece of municipal diplomacy. The strip of grass it grows on was named Skwer Ziemi Aniolow by the Ochota district authority, after the Budapest district Ochota is twinned with, and the district's own announcement of that naming points to the oak standing there.
Nobody has dated it. If you know when it went in, tell us.
One thing worth saying plainly: the most recent dated evidence we could find of it standing is a pair of photographs from May 2015, showing a healthy multi-stemmed oak on a corner lawn matching the register's description. Nothing anywhere reports it felled or delisted since, and Quercus robur is among the hardiest trees a city can plant, so the odds are good. If you walk past the corner of Bialobrzeska and Opaczewska, we would like to hear that it is still there.
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21
The Pear of the Wolski Family
Pear (Pyrus communis / Pyrus pyraster; sources disagree, see notes) · documented standing since before World War II, so at least about 85 years · Ochota
Everything else that stood on this square is gone. The Wolski family's farmhouse garden was here, and beneath it, through the German occupation, an underground shelter known as Bunkier Krysia, where roughly forty people of Jewish origin were hidden. It was discovered in March 1944, and the family and everyone sheltering with them were murdered. The local Ochota press describes this pear as the only living witness left on the site, the oldest tree in the area, already growing during the war.
That sentence is also the only age anybody has given it. No planting date survives, so the floor is about 85 years and nobody has set a ceiling.
Warsaw's city council made it a natural monument on 4 August 2024 and recorded it then as in good condition with no visible damage, a fresher check on a tree's health than most pages on this site can offer. The same year it was Ochota's finalist in the city's public Tree of the Year vote.
Two things about it are unsettled, and neither has been resolved. The council designation gives a girth of 285 centimetres and calls it a common pear, Pyrus communis. The city's green-space authority, running that same Tree of the Year vote, gives 293 centimetres and calls it a wild pear, Pyrus pyraster. One puts its height at roughly six metres, the other at nine.
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22
The White Poplar of Park Zaslawa Malickiego
White Poplar (Populus alba) · not documented · Rakowiec, Ochota
Nearly five metres round, in a park with a playground and a pond. The white poplar at the southern end of Park im. Zaslawa Malickiego measures 498 centimetres at the trunk and runs 32 metres up, and it was made a natural monument on 30 December 1987, a quarter of a century before either of the two protected trees standing with it here.
Those three are what makes this corner of Rakowiec worth the walk: a wych elm and a silver maple within about 150 metres of the poplar, three separate designations inside one ordinary neighbourhood park. Nothing about the place announces itself. Benches, a sports field, the local cultural centre, summer events for the people in the blocks around it, and then a tree the width of a small room.
The poplar is the easiest of the three to name from across the grass. The undersides of white poplar leaves are felted white, so the whole crown turns and flickers silver whenever wind crosses the park, and the bark stays pale, marked with dark diamond shapes rather than furrowing the way the elm's does.
Nobody has dated it. The register records the size and the protection and stops there, so if you have seen a planting record for this park, tell us.
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23
The Mountain Elm of Park Zaslawa Malickiego
Wych Elm (Ulmus glabra) · not documented · Rakowiec, Ochota
Most of Europe's big elms are gone. Dutch elm disease moved through the continent in waves across the twentieth century, which is why a wych elm with a trunk over three metres round is a stranger sight in a European city than an oak twice that size. This one measures 312 centimetres and stands 28 metres tall, and Warsaw protected it as a natural monument on 10 October 2012.
It is the middle of three protected trees in one small Ochota park, by date rather than by size: the white poplar at the southern end was signed off in 1987, the silver maple by the pond in 2016. All three stand within about 150 metres of each other, which is unusually generous for a neighbourhood park with a playground in it.
Wych elm gives itself away in the hand. Its leaves are the largest of any European elm, rough as fine sandpaper on the upper side, and set lopsided on the stalk so that one half of the leaf base runs further down than the other. In late winter it flowers before it leafs, and the bare crown reddens with them for a few weeks before anything green appears.
Nobody has dated this one and the register does not try. If you know the planting history of this park, tell us.
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24
The Silver Maple of Park Zaslawa Malickiego
Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum) · not documented · Rakowiec, Ochota
The thickest of this park's three protected trees is also the shortest. The silver maple on the western shore of Staw Rakowiecki measures 502 centimetres round and stops at 17.5 metres, where the white poplar 150 metres away is four centimetres slimmer and nearly twice as tall. That squat build is what a maple does with room to spare: grown in the open with nothing crowding it, it spends on width and on heavy low limbs instead of racing anything for light.
Silver maple is a North American tree, planted across European parks in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for exactly this habit of getting large fast beside water. Its leaves are cut almost to the midrib into five sharp lobes and are pale, close to white, on the underside, so a breeze off the pond turns the whole crown two colours at once.
Warsaw protected it on 22 September 2016, the last of the three designations here to be signed: the poplar in 1987, the wych elm in 2012, then this one. Three protected trees, one pond, one playground, about 150 metres of walking between the lot of them.
Nobody has dated it. If you know when this pond bank was planted, tell us.
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25
The Ash Trees of Park Wielkopolski
European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) · not documented · Ochota
One set of papers, two trees. When Warsaw protected the ashes of Park Wielkopolski on 31 July 1973 it wrote them up as a single natural monument: two European ashes, both 29 metres tall, one 430 centimetres round and the other 398. They stand together about 50 metres in from ul. Filtrowa, and anyone walking up to them sees a pair rather than two separate errands, which is how the register saw them as well.
The trees were protected a decade before the ground they grow on. Park Wielkopolski was laid out in 1938 to a design by Zygmunt Hellwig and Leon Danielewicz, and went onto the register of monuments in 1983; the ashes had already been protected since 1973. Nothing anywhere records when they were planted. If you have seen a planting record for this park, tell us.
Ash is one of the easier trees to read out of season. The bark is smooth and grey on a young stem and finely ridged with age, the leaves are made of paired leaflets along a central rib, and the winter buds are matt black and blunt, which no other tree in this park offers.
A third natural monument, a poplar of an uncertain species, stands about 85 metres away and has its own entry now (war_028). The pair of ashes is still what to walk in for.
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26
Odolanka, the Poplar of Odolany
Black Poplar (Populus nigra) · not documented · Odolany, Wola
The neighbourhood asked for this one. In 2017, with new housing going up around them in Odolany, residents petitioned to have their black poplar protected before the ground under it could be cleared. The City of Warsaw's own page about the tree is dated 19 May that year. The Wola district board gave a positive opinion, and the council signed the designation on 4 October.
What they kept is not one trunk but three, rising symmetrically from a shared base and measuring, at the widest point the city recorded, more than 600 centimetres round the lot of them. It reaches roughly the height of a five-storey block, which in Odolany means level with the windows of the flats it grows beside. Locally it is simply Odolanka, and the city's page calls it a symbol of the neighbourhood.
Black poplar is a floodplain species, built for wet ground and quick growth, with a heavily fissured, often burred trunk and leaves on flattened stalks that shake at almost no wind at all. It is the sound of the tree as much as the shape of it.
Nobody has dated it, and no one has separated those three trunks into individual measurements. If you know either, tell us. Nothing since 2017 reports it gone.
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27
The Poplar of Park Wielkopolski
Poplar (Populus sp.) · not documented · Ochota
Filed in September 2019, this poplar's designation runs two lines and does not say which poplar it is. The photographer who took the only pictures anyone has of it wrote the same thing in his own caption: species unclear. It stands about 85 metres from Park Wielkopolski's two protected ashes, close enough that a visitor to one finds the other without trying, and it is the park's third natural monument rather than its first, arriving forty-six years after the ashes were designated in 1973. Nobody has measured its height or the width of its trunk, which the ashes' own paperwork records to the centimetre. What survives instead is a small set of photographs from 2019 and 2020, all that has been seen of the tree since. No source records its age, and no news of its removal has turned up either. If you know which poplar this is, or have a more recent look at it, tell us.
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28
Starynkiewicz's Yew
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · not documented · Ochota (Filtry Warszawskie)
Six stems rise from one base, and the thickest of them is not even two metres round: the register measured this yew stem by stem in 1975 and recorded 56, 51, 73, 43, 48 and 38 centimetres apiece, one tree wearing six trunks. It grows beside the pressure tower of the Warsaw Water Filters, the plant that gave the city clean water for the first time, built between 1883 and 1886 to William Lindley's design under Sokrat Starynkiewicz, the Russian-appointed mayor who pushed the project through. A bust of Starynkiewicz went up near the same tower in 1907, and the yew has carried his name since. Getting to it means booking one of the plant's own guided tours, since the grounds are a working water-treatment site rather than a park; MPWiK, which still runs it, opens it on scheduled Sundays and occasional evenings. The most recent photograph on record is from 2017, showing a healthy tree inside grounds that have been kept as a heritage site for well over a century, alongside an avenue of London planes planted with the original waterworks. No later sighting has turned up, and no report of its removal either.
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29
The Oak of Biały Kamień
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 100 to 200 years (derived) · Mokotów
Poland's register of natural monuments protects this oak without saying where it is. The entry carries a species, a designation date of 2 July 2013 and a set of measurements, and for a location a cadastral parcel number. Warsaw's own fuller list gets closer without getting precise: in the vicinity of ul. Bialy Kamien, western Mokotow. Expect to do a little looking when you arrive.
What the register does give is a trunk 306 centimetres round and a crown 20.5 metres up. Nobody has dated the tree, so that trunk is the only clock available. A circumference of 306 centimetres is a diameter near 97, and open-grown pedunculate oaks of that thickness generally run somewhere between 100 and 200 years old. The band is wide and it stays wide, because sharpening it would be invention.
Even at the young end of it, this oak was already growing when the Warsaw Uprising broke out in August 1944 and Mokotow became one of the districts that held out longest. Almost nothing built around here came through that autumn intact. The oak did, and in 2013 the city wrote it into the same register that protects the great trees of Lazienki and the university botanical garden, on the strength of one thick trunk on an ordinary suburban street.
If you know when it was planted, tell us.
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30
The Silver Lime of Biały Kamień
Silver Lime (Tilia tomentosa) · roughly 90 to 150 years (derived) · Mokotów
In a strong wind this tree changes colour. Silver lime carries a dense white felt on the underside of every leaf, so a gust turns a green crown pale in seconds, which is where the name comes from and how you tell it apart from the common limes lining half of Warsaw.
It is not a Polish tree by origin. Tilia tomentosa grows wild in southeastern Europe and the Balkans and arrived here as a planting choice, valued for putting up with city air and for flowering late. Warsaw protected this one on 1 October 2013, three months after the pedunculate oak 85 metres up the same street, which makes this short stretch of ul. Bialy Kamien the unlikely holder of two natural monuments.
The register gives it 20 metres of height and a trunk 274 centimetres round. No planting date exists anywhere for it. The trunk works out at a diameter near 87 centimetres, and silver lime is a reasonably fast grower, so a fair reading is somewhere between 90 and 150 years, which would have it standing well before the apartment blocks that surround it now and through the war that flattened most of what stood here then.
Come in July. Silver lime flowers weeks after the common limes have finished, heavily scented, and the whole crown fills with bees.
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31
The Chestnut of Wiktorska
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · roughly 80 to 110 years (derived) · Mokotów
Warsaw wrote two trees in this one courtyard into its register of natural monuments on the same day in June 2020, 19 metres apart: this horse chestnut and a European ash. The chestnut is the smaller of the pair, 18 metres up on a trunk 251 centimetres round, which is a diameter of almost exactly 80 centimetres. The two figures the register gives agree with each other to within a centimetre, so somebody really did put a tape around it.
The courtyard belongs to Osiedle WSM Mokotow, built by the interwar Warsaw Housing Cooperative, which laid its blocks out around shared open green instead of private gardens. That is why a tree this size is standing in the middle of a residential estate, and why you can generally walk in and look at it, although no source states the access outright and the yard is somebody's home ground.
Nobody has recorded a planting date. The trunk points at roughly 80 to 110 years, derived from its thickness and from nothing else, so treat it as a range rather than a birthday. Anyone living in these blocks probably knows more than the register does, and we would like to hear it.
Go in May, when the flower candles stand up off the crown. By late summer Warsaw's chestnuts brown under the leaf miner moth that reached Poland in the 1990s.
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32
The Ash of Wiktorska
European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) · not documented; girth suggests a mature multi-decade tree · Mokotów
The disease now killing Europe's ash trees was first noticed in Poland, in the early 1990s, and has been working through the country's ash ever since. Warsaw made this one a protected natural monument in June 2020, thirty years into that, which is the context a trunk 368 centimetres round deserves.
It is a big ash by any standard: a diameter of 117 centimetres, and the register's girth and diameter figures agree with each other to about a millimetre, which is what a real measurement looks like. It carries its 20 metres in the courtyard of Osiedle WSM Mokotow, the interwar cooperative estate on ul. Wiktorska, 19 metres from a horse chestnut protected on the same day. Two monuments, one yard, two species, measured separately.
We have put no age on it. Published growth rates for open-grown Fraxinus excelsior scatter badly, and at this thickness any single figure would be either flattery or an insult, so the field stays empty and the girth sits on file until there is a better way to read it.
The courtyard reads as shared, open ground rather than a gated development, which is how these estates were laid out, but nothing we found says so in as many words. If you know the yard, or know how old the ash is, tell us.
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33
The Silver Maple of Wołoska
Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum) · not documented; see girth · Mokotów
Polish law protects an American tree here. Acer saccharinum grows wild in the river bottoms of eastern North America and came to European cities for its speed and for its leaves, cut nearly to the midrib and silver-white underneath, which lift and flicker in any breeze. Warsaw signed this one into the register of natural monuments on 4 January 2022, one of the newest protected trees in the city.
It stands 20 metres tall on a trunk 339 centimetres round, 108 centimetres through. We have given it no age. Silver maple is among the fastest growing maples there is and its rate swings with how wet its feet are, so converting that girth into years would describe the formula rather than the tree.
Nobody has written its history down either, which is what usually happens to a tree standing at a street number rather than in a park. No legend, no dated planting, no plaque we know of. What it has instead is size, in a species that normally gets felled for brittleness long before it reaches this, and a legal designation that arrived decades after the tree did.
One honest warning. The address is ul. Woloska 139 in Mokotow, and we have not confirmed whether you can walk up to the trunk or only see it from the pavement. If you get there first, tell us which it is.
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34
The Black Locust of ul. Żaryna
Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) · not documented; height/girth mismatch suggests damage history, see notes · Mokotów
This tree is 160 centimetres round and five metres tall, which is the wrong shape for a black locust. The species normally runs to twenty metres or more on a trunk that thick. A short heavy stem like this usually means the crown came off at some point, to a storm or to a saw, and the tree carried on from whatever was left. The register records the two numbers and not the story behind them, so that reading is inference rather than fact.
Robinia pseudoacacia is North American, named after the French royal gardener Jean Robin and planted across Europe from the seventeenth century onward for its tolerance of poor sandy ground, which Poland has in quantity. It escaped the gardens long ago and now grows half wild here, which makes it an unlikely candidate for legal protection. Warsaw protected this one anyway, on 24 September 2014, on a quiet Mokotow street with no park attached to it.
We have not dated it. Black locust grows fast, and a tree that lost its top and regrew from the stump keeps no honest record in its girth.
Come in June. Locust flowers hang in white pea-flowered bunches and the scent carries far enough to find the tree with your eyes shut, which on a street like this is the most practical direction we can give you.
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35
The Birch of Szczekocińska
Silver Birch (Betula pendula) · not documented; unusually large for the species, see girth · Mokotów
Warsaw declared this birch a protected natural monument on 23 December 1981, ten days after martial law was imposed across Poland. Soldiers were on the streets, the telephone lines were cut, and somebody at the city filed the paperwork to protect a tree.
The tree earns it. Betula pendula is a pioneer species, quick up and usually done inside a century, on a trunk that stays slim; a girth of 160 centimetres and a height of 18 metres is a large specimen by the standards of anything that calls itself a birch. That is also why no age appears here. Published growth rates for silver birch run all over the place, and an outlier this size would break the arithmetic in whichever direction you pushed it.
It stands near the pedestrian crossing at ul. Szczekocinska 4a in southern Mokotow, which is the whole of the address the register gives. Forty-five years of protection have kept a tree that its own species does not usually allow to get old, on a street corner where nothing else marks it out and no plaque explains why it is there.
If you know how old it is, or you remember the birch already standing before 1981, tell us. On this one the register has a date of protection and nothing else, and somebody on that street will know more.
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36
The Copper Beech of Langiewicza
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica 'Purpurea') · roughly 100 to 160 years (derived) · Ochota
A copper beech is an accident somebody kept. The purple leaf is a mutation that turns up now and then in ordinary green beech woods, and the copper beeches of European gardens descend from a handful of those chance trees, propagated by gardeners who liked the colour. This one has been under legal protection in Warsaw since 23 April 1974, more than fifty years.
It stands 26 metres tall on a trunk 320 centimetres round, and the city's own records carry the same two measurements as the national register, so the figures have been taken twice. Nobody wrote down when it was planted. At a diameter near 102 centimetres, beech of this size usually works out somewhere between 100 and 160 years, which is a band rather than a date and stays one here.
Even at the young end of that band the tree was standing in August 1944, when Ochota was fought over, burnt and emptied of its people. The district was rebuilt around whatever survived, and ul. Langiewicza is one of the quiet streets that came out of that rebuilding. The beech predates the street as it now looks.
Go in May. The new leaves open a deep translucent red before they harden and darken toward the bronze they hold all summer, and a beech of this height in fresh leaf is worth planning a walk around.
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37
The Silver Maple of Jazdów
Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum) · not documented; see girth · Śródmieście
An expressway opened 30 metres from this maple in July 1974. Four months later, in November, Warsaw declared the tree a protected natural monument. Nobody wrote down whether the two facts are connected. The road, Trasa Lazienkowska, is still there, cut straight through the middle of the city, and so is the tree.
It stands on skwer Stefana Kisielewskiego, a small named square beside the Na Rozdrozu cafe in Srodmiescie: a square, a cafe and a tree, which is a generous amount of direction from a register that mostly gives street numbers. The university botanical garden, whose twenty-three protected trees were designated the same year, is a couple of hundred metres away, so the two make one walk.
What the register does not give is a single measurement. No girth, no height, which is unusual and means no age either, because there is nothing to derive one from. What it names is the species, Acer saccharinum, an American maple with leaves cut nearly to the midrib and silvered on the back, and a date, 8 November 1974. A photograph from 2021 shows it standing and in leaf.
So this entry has a hole in the middle of it. If you get a tape around the trunk, or you know when the tree went in, send us the number and it goes on the page.
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38
The Honey Locust of Fałata
Honey Locust (Gleditsia triacanthos) · not documented; see girth · Mokotów
Honey locust grows thorns on its own trunk, branched like antlers and up to the length of a hand. Gleditsia triacanthos comes from the central United States, where those spines kept large animals off the bark, and it reached European streets as a tough city tree that puts up with drought, salt and bad soil. Many planted in cities are thornless selections, so do not count on finding spines on this one. Warsaw made it a protected natural monument on 9 November 2022, one of the newest entries in the city's register.
It is 18 metres tall and its trunk is 260 centimetres round. The record then repeats that same figure of 260 as the trunk's diameter, which cannot be right, since a circumference of 260 centimetres gives a diameter near 83. We have kept the girth and left the other number where we found it, and with one measurement in doubt we have not turned either into an age.
The name is about the pods. They hang long, dark and twisted, and the pulp inside is sweet enough that livestock ate it where the tree comes from. On ul. Falata in Mokotow they mostly litter the pavement in autumn, along with leaflets that turn a clean yellow before they drop. Whether you can reach the trunk or only see it, we have not confirmed.
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39
The Columnar Oaks of Łowicka
Pedunculate Oak, columnar form (Quercus robur 'Fastigiata') · not documented; see girth · Mokotów
Pedunculate oak spreads. These two go straight up, narrow and tight as poplars, because they are Quercus robur 'Fastigiata', a naturally occurring upright form that gardeners have propagated since the nineteenth century for exactly this shape. Warsaw protected the pair on 2 July 2013 at one address on ul. Lowicka, and measured them separately rather than as a clump: this one 22 metres tall on a trunk 270 centimetres round, its companion taller at 25 metres and slimmer at 245.
The university botanical garden has two of the same cultivar flanking an entrance about 1.7 kilometres north, and the effect is identical in both places. An oak that reads as a column instead of a canopy stops anyone who knows what an oak is supposed to look like.
Nobody has dated these two. Fastigiate oaks went into European gardens and streets right through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which is a period rather than a year, so no figure goes here.
One useful detail comes from the photograph in the city's records: it was taken from the pavement of ul. Narbutta. You can see both trees from the street corner without entering the courtyard at Lowicka 52, which matters, because whether a visitor can walk up to the trunks themselves is the one thing about this pair we have not established.
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