What is the oldest tree in Milan?
Milan's oldest tree is one of a pair of ginkgo trees in the Orto Botanico di Brera, planted in 1775 when the garden's founders imported them directly from China. Both are now around 250 years old and grow a few steps from the garden's 18th-century greenhouse on Via Brera 28.
Milan has never been an easy city for an old tree to survive in. Wars, plague and relentless nineteenth and twentieth century redevelopment levelled most of what predates them, so almost nothing on this list is medieval. The one clear exception is the university's own ginkgo biloba pair, a male and a female planted together in 1775 when Abbot Fulgenzio Vitman was building the Orto Botanico di Brera for Empress Maria Theresa's new medical faculty, importing seed directly from China less than two decades after the species had reached Europe at all. Italy's monumental tree registry calculates their age from growth data at 235 years, a little short of the 251 years a straight planting-date count would give; this page states both rather than picking one, since the gap is exactly the kind of rounding error that comes from measuring a slow grower by two different methods. Either way, they are Milan's oldest trees by a wide margin over anything else here, and the garden marked their joint 250th anniversary with a public conference in March 2026.
The yew, the oaks and their peers across other cities are collected in Europe's 10 Most Remarkable Ancient Trees.