Munich protects its remarkable trees by law and number: a 2021 city ordinance registers 117 Naturdenkmäler covering 200 trees, each legally protected the way a listed building would be. That bureaucratic precision sits oddly with their origins: planted by a royal count's landscape garden, grown wild in a monastery orchard, set in the ground by twelve thousand schoolchildren celebrating a war's end. Two of the trees below carry rival claims to being the city's single oldest tree, and neither is settled. Munich has not tried to force the point.
0 of 62 visited in Munich
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · 300-350 years · Nederling, Moosach
A painter made this tree famous by sitting under it, and the tree has been fighting for its life ever since. Local tradition holds that the linden was planted as a peace tree after the Thirty Years' War ended in 1648, which would put its planting in the mid-17th century, though like most trees on this list its exact age rests on estimate rather than a documented planting record. By the time landscape painter Philipp Röth worked in its shade around the turn of the 20th century, the tree was already reckoned to be some 200 years old, and it now carries his name and a memorial plaque. That long life has come at a cost: a botched fungal treatment in the 1980s left the trunk hollow, and the tree today stands on eight metal crown braces and a branch support, watered and pruned as what one local report calls an intensive-care patient. Winter lindens can live a thousand years under good conditions, which makes the Röth-Linde's current state, still leafing out every spring at 23 metres tall with a trunk over six metres around, as much a story about arboriculture as about age.
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 600 years · Sendling-Westpark
This oak has outlasted the village it once stood outside, the Bavarian duchy that once ruled the land, and most of its own major branches. A 2017 recommendation from the Sendling-Westpark district's citizen assembly, arguing for the tree's protection and continued care, dates it at roughly 600 years old, which would put its origins in the 1420s, a period when Munich was still ruled directly by Wittelsbach dukes and when Duke Albrecht III married in the city in 1436. No source directly connects the tree's planting to that or any specific historical event, so any such link stays unclaimed here. What is documented is more recent damage: three major limbs have been removed over the years and a fourth broke off on its own, thinning a crown that once spread wide with the snake-like, twisting branch pattern typical of very old pedunculate oaks. A new protective fence went up around the trunk in July 2022 to keep the compacted soil at the roots from getting worse. The tree still stands at the eastern corner of the small park that carries its name, a six-century survivor now fenced off from the joggers and dog walkers who pass it daily.
Photo: Tkarcher (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 155 years · Flaucher, Sendling
Twelve thousand schoolchildren planted this oak in one afternoon, or at least watched a handful of their classmates do it. On 1 July 1871, weeks after the peace treaty ending the Franco-Prussian War was signed in Frankfurt, Munich staged a peace festival at the Flaucher meadows along the Isar: a procession of children, city councillors and guests gathered while selected boys and girls set a young oak sapling into the ground. A plaque at the site still reads, in German, Reich and Peace Oak, planted by the youth of the city of Munich on 1 July 1871, making this one of the few trees on this list with an exact, undisputed planting date rather than an estimate. Similar Friedenseichen went into the ground across German cities that year, each one a small piece of civic theatre marking the unification of the German Empire under Kaiser Wilhelm I as much as the peace itself. This one has had a century and a half since to grow into an ordinary, unremarkable-looking oak in a riverside park, its real distinction lying entirely in the date rather than the trunk.
Photo: Rufus46 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · 300 years · Schwabing-Freimann
This beech was already old when the park around it was new. The Englischer Garten was laid out from 1789 on the orders of Elector Karl Theodor, designed by the American-born Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, as one of the first public parks on the European continent, open to everyone rather than reserved for a court. Most of what grows in the park today dates from that design and its later 19th century expansion, but this beech, standing between the Forstweg and Friedrich-Ludwig-von-Sckell-Weg paths near the park's second riding trail, predates the whole project, described in Munich's own natural monument register as over 300 years old and the outstanding tree of its immediate surroundings. That would put its origins in the very early 18th century or before, decades ahead of Rumford's landscaping crews, meaning the park's designers either built around an existing tree or the beech simply outgrew whatever else stood nearby before them. No individual measurement or precise felling-based age exists for it, so the three-century figure is treated here as the registered estimate it is rather than a settled fact.
Photo: Peterf (CC BY-SA 4.0)
European White Elm (Ulmus laevis) · 100-200 years · Schwabing-Freimann
Munich's own natural monument register makes a specific, checkable claim about these two trees: no older elms are known anywhere in the city. Standing northwest of the Monopteros temple and southwest of the Chinese Tower, in the busiest part of the Englischer Garten, the pair are European white elms, a species that has fared better against Dutch elm disease than most of its European relatives but is still uncommon at real size in any German city after the epidemic spread through the 20th century. Neither tree carries an individual measured age, so the claim rests on comparison rather than a number, but it is specific and official rather than a vague tourist superlative, made by the same city ordinance that protects 200 trees across Munich by name. Thousands of visitors pass within metres of the two elms every week on their way to the Chinese Tower's beer garden, most without knowing they are walking past the oldest confirmed elms the city can point to.
Photo: Peterf (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Fern-leaved Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. asplenifolia) · 80-150 years · Schwabing-Freimann
The old trees of the Englischer Garten did not survive by luck. The park has been tended by the Bavarian palace administration for more than two hundred years and is protected as a garden monument and a landscape conservation area, which is what kept the growing city from building on it. This beech is on the register for a different reason again: it barely exists anywhere else in Munich. The fern-leaved beech is a naturally occurring form of the common European beech in which the leaves grow narrow, deeply cut and lace-like instead of the usual broad oval, a genetic quirk that occasionally turns up in beech forests and gets propagated deliberately when someone notices it. Munich's specimen, standing west of the administrative building near the Chinese Tower on the bank of the Schwabinger Bach stream, has a trunk 3.67 metres around and is registered by the city specifically for how rare the form is within Munich rather than for size or documented age, unlike most of the natural monuments on this list. From a distance in full leaf it can look almost feathery compared to an ordinary beech standing nearby, a small, deliberate anomaly kept alive in one of the park's quieter corners rather than along its main paths.
Photo: Peterf (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 150-300 years · Nymphenburg
This oak grows in the one part of a royal palace garden built to look like it wasn't designed at all. The Dörfchen, or little village, is a cluster of rustic farm-style buildings inside Nymphenburg Palace Park, built from 1803 as a picturesque contrast to the palace's formal Baroque and later English-landscape grounds surrounding it, complete with a working dairy and a chapel meant to evoke ordinary rural life for an audience that never had to live it. The oak stands near the Brunnhaus, on the way toward the Badenburg pavilion and the park's Großer See lake, and Munich's own natural monument register singles it out as unique in size within the city, a claim about scale rather than age, since no source gives the tree a documented planting date or precise age. What is certain is that it has grown large enough, inside grounds that have been continuously maintained by the Bavarian royal family and its successors since the 17th century, to earn individual legal protection in a park already full of centuries-old formal avenues.
Photo: Peterf (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Mediterranean Hackberry (Celtis australis) · 80-150 years · Maxvorstadt
Eight Mediterranean trees grow on a green strip beside one of Munich's busiest ring roads, in a city more than 500 kilometres north of where the species grows wild. Celtis australis, native across southern Europe and North Africa, is registered by Munich as an extremely rare species within the city area, and this group of eight, standing on a green strip on Oskar-von-Miller-Ring west of the Siemens corporate headquarters, is protected as a natural monument specifically for that rarity rather than for any individual tree's size or age. No source gives the group a planting date, though a stand of eight mature specimens growing together suggests a single deliberate planting rather than volunteers that seeded themselves over time, most likely as an ornamental choice for the street rather than a remnant of anything older. Traffic on the ring road runs past them constantly, an odd setting for what the city's own records treat as a genuine botanical rarity worth the same legal protection as its oldest oaks and lindens.
Photo: Rufus46 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Japanese Pagoda Tree (Styphnolobium japonicum) · 100-180 years · Maxvorstadt
This tree flowers in August, the quietest month of the year for almost anything else blooming in Munich, and does it well enough into old age that the city has singled it out for legal protection twice over, once for rarity of species and once for its unusual size. Styphnolobium japonicum, despite the common name, is native to China rather than Japan and was introduced to European gardens in the 18th century for exactly this trait: heat tolerance, resistance to drought and pollution, and a late, generous flowering of small cream-white blooms that pollinators rely on after most spring flowerers are finished. Munich's specimen stands on the grounds of the property at Karolinenplatz 2a, part of a formal obelisk square laid out in the early 19th century to commemorate Bavarian soldiers who died in Napoleon's Russian campaign, a considerably more sober origin than the tree growing on it. No source gives the tree a documented planting date, but the city's own register notes its size is rare for the species within Munich's built-up centre, an urban tree doing more than its share of feeding late-summer bees.
Photo: Martinus KE (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Wych Elm (Ulmus glabra) · 80-150 years · Maximiliansplatz
Almost every elm this size that once grew in Munich is gone, and that absence is the entire reason this one is protected. Dutch elm disease, a fungus spread by bark beetles, swept through European elm populations across the 20th century in repeated waves, and Munich's own natural monument register notes plainly that wych elms of any real size have become rare across the whole city as a result, inner districts included. This one has survived on Maximiliansplatz, a roughly 300 by 60 metre park-like square laid out in the English-garden style along what was once the city's western fortification line, redesigned into a green public space after the walls came down in the 19th century. No source gives the tree an individual planting date or precise age, and its story here is less about a specific event than about what elm disease has quietly removed from cities across the continent: a species that was once an unremarkable street and park tree is now something Munich has to name and legally protect just to keep a mature specimen standing.
Photo: Peterf (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · 150-250 years · Nymphenburg
Every copper beech in Europe descends from an accident. The purple leaf is a mutation that appears rarely and at random in wild green beech forests, and every ornamental one since has been propagated by gardeners who found the freak worth keeping. This one stands about 25 metres south of the Badenburg, the bathing pavilion Joseph Effner built for Elector Max Emanuel between 1718 and 1721 around what is generally reckoned the first heated indoor pool built in Europe since Roman times. Munich's natural monument ordinance protects the tree as a solitary specimen and gives its relationship with that building as the reason, which is a statute saying out loud that where a tree stands can matter as much as how big it is. Local descriptions of the park rank it among the mightiest beeches anywhere in the city. Its age is not documented anywhere. What is documented is the ground: Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell converted these grounds from a French baroque garden into an English landscape park between 1799 and 1823, which is when most of the park's free-standing specimen trees were placed, so a planting inside that window is plausible without being proven. Come in late April and the new leaves open a bright translucent red, darkening to near black by August.
Photo: Rufus46 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) · 150-250 years · Nymphenburg
Munich protects this lime, in law, for being strange looking. The reason recorded in the city's natural monument ordinance is bizarrer und knorriger Wuchs, bizarre and gnarled growth, together with a striking appearance, which is an unusually candid thing for a protection statute to say about a tree. It earns it. The trunk leans hard out over the Badenburger See and the whole crown follows, throwing its heaviest limbs sideways across the water rather than upward, so the tree reads as a single long gesture toward the lake. A bench sits underneath, facing the Monopteros on the far shore. A German tree-recorders' database measured the trunk at 4.2 metres around in 2014 and the height at 19 metres, and estimates the tree at about 180 years, which would place its planting inside Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell's conversion of these grounds into an English landscape park between 1799 and 1823. That figure is a volunteer estimate rather than an official one, and the city's own register gives no age at all. Come in winter and the case for the tree is at its clearest: bare, every crooked limb legible against the sky, the lake frozen behind it and the pavilion small and white in the distance.
Photo: NiamhNature (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Fern-leaved Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. asplenifolia) · 150-220 years · Nymphenburg
No fern-leaved beech anywhere is much more than two centuries old, because the tree did not exist before about 1804. It is a cultivated form of the ordinary European beech whose leaves are cut into narrow ribbons, and it cannot be relied on to come true from seed, so every one of them has been grafted or struck from cuttings taken off another. That gives this specimen an unusually hard ceiling on its age, which is useful in a park where almost nothing else has a date. It stands alone at a fork in the path about 50 metres south of the Amalienburg, the rococo hunting lodge Francois de Cuvillies built in the 1730s, with a small metal plate on the trunk marking it as a natural monument. Munich's ordinance calls it a mighty and rare solitary specimen in a good position, and a German tree-recorders' database measured it in 2019 at 2.95 metres around and 25 metres tall, estimating roughly 180 years and recording its condition as vital. Look closely at the foliage and the trick of the tree becomes clear: most of the leaves are shredded to threads, but a branch here and there reverts and throws out ordinary broad beech leaves instead.
Photo: Rufus46 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Weeping Beech (Fagus sylvatica 'Pendula') · 120-200 years · Nymphenburg
Munich protects this beech partly because people are fond of it. The reason entered in the city's natural monument ordinance is that it is a dominant tree in a historic garden with besondere Bedeutung für Münchner Bürger, particular significance for the citizens of Munich, which is a legal document recording public affection as grounds for protection. That is rarer than it sounds; most entries on the same list argue from size, rarity or townscape effect. The tree stands just south of the Schwanenbrücke, the swan bridge over the canal that runs north through the park. A weeping beech grows nothing like the wild form it was bred from: instead of a clean grey column carrying a high crown, the limbs arch outward and then fall, so the branches hang to the ground and the whole tree closes around a hollow space at its centre. Walking under one is the point of it, and generations of Munich children have done exactly that here. Its age is not recorded anywhere. The cultivar has only been in general garden circulation since the early nineteenth century, and the surrounding park was landscaped between 1799 and 1823, which brackets it loosely and honestly without pretending to a date.
White Ash (Fraxinus americana)
There is an American ash on a square in central Munich, and the city's own ordinance calls the species rare here.
Fraxinus americana is the wood a classic baseball bat is turned from, straight-grained, light and good at absorbing shock. In Europe it is a park curiosity rather than a forest tree, which is why Munich's protection order gives as its reason: dominant tree with an interesting growth form, rare in Munich. It stands in the green strip at Maximiliansplatz, in the middle of the city, free to walk up to.
Ashes have become a heavier thing to look at over the past two decades. A fungus called ash dieback has been working through Europe's native ash since the 1990s and has killed a large share of it, while the American species is under siege at home from the emerald ash borer, a beetle that has taken tens of millions of trees across North America. A big ash of any species with its crown in good order is no longer an ordinary sight.
Its age is simply unknown: the city's list records why a tree is protected and not when it was planted, and no dated source was found. Ash comes into leaf later and drops earlier than most of what surrounds it, so it spends more of the year bare than its neighbours do.
Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos)
This lime is already drawn on a plan of the park from 1807, which makes it one of very few trees in Munich with a paper trail.
Munich's protection ordinance says so in as many words: historic lime, already present in plans from the year 1807. Read that as a floor rather than an age. A tree worth drawing was not a sapling, so it was standing when Bavaria was a kingdom barely a year old and when the Englischer Garten itself was under twenty years into its existence. The park had been laid out from 1789 on the orders of Elector Karl Theodor, at the urging of Benjamin Thompson, and was unusual in Europe for being open to everyone rather than to a court.
What the tree has watched since is the whole modern history of the city, from the first generation of Müncheners allowed to walk in a royal park to whoever is crossing the meadow this afternoon.
Beyond that 1807 drawing there is no age and no girth on record, so anything more precise would be invention. Large-leaved lime flowers in June, ahead of the other European limes, and an old one like this holds a broad, heavy, slightly lopsided crown that reads as a single dome from right across the grass.
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica)
Munich's ordinance calls this one of the mightiest beeches in the city and notes that it carries branches almost to the ground.
The second half of that is the part to hold on to. A beech grown in a wood loses its lower limbs to shade and ends up a smooth grey column with all its leaves fifteen metres overhead. A beech grown in the open keeps everything, and the crown comes down in a skirt you have to duck under to reach the trunk. This one has had the room to do it, in the Flaucher, the belt of riverside park along the Isar in the south of the city where Munich goes to swim and grill through the summer.
The river beside it is not the one it grew up with. Straightened and walled in the nineteenth century, the stretch through the city was rebuilt between 2000 and 2011, the concrete lifted out and gravel banks let back in, so the beech now stands over a braided river rather than a channel.
The city's list gives the reason for protection and no dimensions, so there is no published age or girth. From late October the whole crown turns copper and holds it for weeks, and beech is stubborn about letting go: the young growth keeps its dead leaves all winter.
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata)
For centuries in this part of Europe, a village's justice was handed down under a lime.
The Gerichtslinde, the court lime, was a real institution: a broad tree on the square with benches beneath it, where the local court sat in the open because everybody could then see and hear what had been decided. Small-leaved lime was usually the tree chosen, because it lives long, takes heavy pruning and builds exactly that kind of wide, shading crown. Munich protects this one for its trunk, which the ordinance describes as having rarity value in the city on account of its form and its girth. It stands on open ground in the Englischer Garten.
That girth is never given a number. The city's list says why a tree is protected and stops there, so the trunk that earned this tree its protection has no published measurement and no date beside it.
Small-leaved lime flowers later than any other European lime, in late June and July, once most of the summer's blossom is over. The flowers themselves are small, greenish and easy to walk past. You will not walk past the sound, because the whole crown fills with bees, and the scent reaches you a good twenty metres before the tree does.
Norway Maple (Acer platanoides) · Altstadt-Lehel
Munich protects this maple for being big, which says more about the species than about the tree. Acer platanoides is among the most planted street trees in Europe and among the most frequently cut back: fast, cheap, tolerant of road salt, compacted soil and bad air, and generally treated as replaceable. The city's 2021 natural monument ordinance takes the opposite line here, entering it as stadtbildwirksam, effective in the townscape, and rare at this size within the city. That is a statute saying a common tree becomes an uncommon one simply by being left alone.
It stands on Herrnstraße in the Lehel, the grid of tall nineteenth century blocks laid out between the old town wall and the Isar when Munich first built beyond its gates. This is dense inner city: courtyards, parked cars, five storeys on both sides, and one crown holding the middle of it.
If you want to be certain what you are looking at, snap a leaf stalk. A Norway maple bleeds white, and the sycamore it is constantly mistaken for does not. In April it flowers before it leafs, and the bare crown turns acid yellow-green for a fortnight.
The ordinance records why a tree is protected and never when it was planted. No dated source exists for this one, so how long it has stood here is not known.
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · Altstadt-Lehel
The school across this green space has been teaching since 1559, which makes it the oldest in Munich. The beech below it carries no recorded date of any kind, and the city protects it anyway. Munich's 2021 natural monument ordinance enters it as a mighty, dominant tree, effective in the streetscape, and that is the entire reasoning.
Fagus sylvatica behaves badly in cities, which is why a full grown one in the Lehel is worth the detour. It wants deep, moist, well drained ground, it resents compacted soil, and its bark is thin and smooth enough to scald in full sun where a rough barked oak would shrug. Given room it becomes the most dominant broadleaf in central Europe: the shade under a mature beech is close to total, almost nothing germinates in it, and the floor stays bare leaf litter year after year. That is how the species took most of the continent's forests.
The Wilhelmsgymnasium moved into its building on the corner in 1877, a Jesuit foundation by then three centuries into its second life as a state school. The green strip on its south side is the sort of leftover municipal ground that usually holds bins and a bike rack.
No age is on record. The ordinance lists reasons for protection and carries no column for dates or dimensions, and nothing else has measured this tree.
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · Altstadt-Lehel
Munich's beer gardens are chestnut groves for an engineering reason. Brewers dug cellars along the Isar to hold beer through the summer and planted horse chestnuts over them, because the species throws heavy shade from shallow roots that will not force their way into a vault. Then they discovered that people would rather drink under the trees than carry the beer home, and the beer garden existed.
This one shades no cellar. It stands at the southwest corner of St.-Anna-Platz in the Lehel, between two churches of very different temperament: the small Klosterkirche finished in 1733, generally counted the first rococo church built in Old Bavaria, and the far larger parish church that went up beside it in the 1890s. Both were gutted by bombing and rebuilt.
The 2021 natural monument ordinance protects the tree as platzbildprägend, defining the square, and calls it mighty and healthy. Healthy is the word to notice. Since the 1990s the horse chestnut leaf miner, a moth out of the Balkans, has browned and curled the foliage of chestnuts across Europe by mid July, so a chestnut still carrying green leaves in August is doing better than most of its species.
Its age is not on record anywhere. The ordinance gives reasons and no dates, and nothing else has measured this tree.
Mediterranean Hackberry (Celtis australis) · Schwabing-West
The hill in this park is what was left of Munich after 1945. From 1946 onward the rubble of the bombed city was carted up to Schwabing and piled into the Luitpoldhügel, roughly 37 metres of broken masonry now buried under grass and footpaths, with a view across to the Olympic Park from the top.
The park underneath it is older. It was laid out in 1911, when 90 lime trees went in for the ninetieth birthday of Prince Regent Luitpold. The hackberry is not one of them. Celtis australis belongs to southern Europe, Asia Minor and North Africa, its natural range stopping well south of the Alps, and Munich's 2021 natural monument ordinance calls it an extremely rare species in the city, protected here for being beautiful and for an interesting growth form rather than for any size.
It was the timber of whip handles, pitchforks and walking sticks, chosen because it bends a long way before it breaks. The quickest way to be sure you have found one is the leaf: lopsided at the base, one half running further down the stalk than the other, with a hard toothed edge. The fruit is a small dark drupe, sweet and almost entirely stone.
The ordinance records why the tree is protected, never when it was planted, and no age exists for it anywhere.
Amur Cork Tree (Phellodendron amurense) · Schwabing-West
You can press a thumb into this tree and the bark gives. The Amur cork tree carries a thick, soft, deeply ridged corky layer that dents under a hand and springs back, which is exactly why Munich's 2021 natural monument ordinance protects it for an interesting bark pattern and calls the species extremely rare in the city.
Phellodendron amurense comes from the Amur river country on the Russian and Chinese border, and from Korea and northern Japan, which is a continental climate with harder winters than Bavaria has ever managed. Under the cork the inner bark is a startling sulphur yellow, and it is one of the fundamental herbs of Chinese medicine. The leaves are pinnate, like an ash, and turn clear yellow in autumn; the berries are black and smell of turpentine when crushed. In the northeastern United States the same tree seeds itself so aggressively into hardwood forest that several states have banned its sale. In a Schwabing park it just stands there being unusual.
The ground it stands on is the Luitpoldpark, laid out in 1911 and dominated by a hill made from the rubble of the bombed city. A Mediterranean hackberry, protected under the same ordinance for the same rarity, grows about 200 metres east.
The ordinance lists reasons and carries no dates or measurements, so the tree's age is unknown.
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · Au-Haidhausen
Gasteig comes from gacher Steig, steep path, and that is the whole explanation of this corner of Munich. The ground drops away here to the Isar, so everything on the slope has had to be terraced, buttressed or built into the bank, and the horse chestnut stands at the top of the fall. Munich's 2021 natural monument ordinance protects it as a striking, wide-spreading tree, particularly effective in the streetscape.
Wide-spreading is the phrase worth stopping on. A street chestnut is normally cut back into a lollipop to keep it clear of the trams, the wires and the upper windows, and it spends its life as half a crown. This one has been left to throw its lower limbs out sideways, which is what the species does when nobody interferes.
Its neighbour is the Gasteig itself, the concert hall that opened in 1985 as home of the Munich Philharmonic and emptied out in 2021 for a rebuild, the orchestra decamping to a converted industrial hall across the river. The tree stayed where it was.
The species is not local either. Aesculus hippocastanum is native to a handful of mountain ravines in Greece and Albania, where it is a threatened tree, and planted by the million everywhere else. No age is recorded here: Munich's ordinance says why a tree is protected and never how old it is.
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · Au-Haidhausen
The word Munich's ordinance uses for this tree is Solitär, which in the trade means a tree with open ground on every side and therefore the shape the species actually has. Almost no street tree gets that. They go in as rows, get pruned away from windows and cables, and end up as half a crown facing the road. This chestnut got the room, and the 2021 natural monument ordinance says as much: a solitary, beautiful and evenly grown tree, very dominant in the streetscape.
It stands where Sommerstraße meets Edlingerstraße in the Au, the low quarter on the flood plain of the Isar that spent centuries being washed out by the river and just as long being the poorest district in Munich. A few streets away, Mariahilfplatz has hosted the Auer Dult three times a year since 1905, a crockery and junk fair whose market privileges run back to the eighteenth century.
An evenly grown horse chestnut is a specific thing to stand under: a dome that starts low and closes to a point, carried on limbs that sweep down before turning back up at the tips. In May the whole of it goes up in white candles, each flower marked with a yellow blotch that turns red once it has been pollinated, so the tree is telling the bees which ones are already finished.
No age is on record.
Downy Birch (Betula pubescens) · Sendling
Downy birch is the last broadleaved tree before the tundra. Betula pubescens grows further north than any other, past the Arctic Circle in Scandinavia and across Iceland, and it manages it by staying quick, modest and short lived; a hundred years is a long run for one. Which makes Munich's reason for protecting this one worth reading twice: a mighty solitary tree, rare at this size in the city.
It stands in the Flaucher, the belt of gravel banks, pine and poplar along the Isar in the south of Munich where the city comes to swim and grill from May to September. That is the right ground for it. This is the wet-footed birch, the one that takes bogs, fens and river gravel where the silver birch cannot follow, and the fine hairs on its young twigs, the pubescens of the name, are how the two are told apart.
Birch bark is white for the same reason a roof is painted white. Betulin, the compound that makes the papery outer layer, reflects sunlight and keeps the trunk from warming and then splitting on cold bright days. It also burns when soaking wet, which is why birch bark has been lighting fires across northern Europe for as long as there have been fires to light.
The ordinance gives the reason for protection and no dimensions and no date, and nothing else has measured the tree.
European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) · Schwabing-Freimann
Munich's ordinance gives three words for why this tree is protected: extrem ausladende Krone, an extremely wide-spreading crown. No size, no age, no history, nothing about the street. Just the shape, and it was enough.
The shape is also evidence. Fraxinus excelsior grown in a wood goes up tall and narrow, drawn on by its neighbours, and it only spreads when there is nothing beside it to compete with. A crown wide enough to earn a protection order on its own is a crown that grew in the open, and Freimann was farmland and village until Munich absorbed it in 1931. An ash does not spread like that in a street.
Ash is also the tree Europe is currently losing. A fungus from east Asia, harmless to the ashes it evolved alongside, reached Poland in the early 1990s and has been killing European ash ever since, blackening the leaves and thinning the crown from the top down. Some trees resist it and nobody yet knows how many, so a mature ash still carrying a full crown is not the ordinary sight it was thirty years ago.
The ordinance carries no dates and no measurements, and nothing else has recorded this tree, so its age is unknown. What is on the record is that in a list full of mighty and dominant trees, this one got in on width alone.
Weeping Beech (Fagus sylvatica 'Pendula') · Schwabing-Freimann
By the city's own reckoning this is the largest weeping beech standing in Munich. The 2021 natural monument ordinance says so in its reason for protection, hedged with derzeit, currently, which is the honest way to make a superlative about something alive.
Every weeping beech is a graft. Fagus sylvatica 'Pendula' does not come true from seed, so each one is a cutting from the same weeping line joined onto the roots of an ordinary green beech, and on older specimens the union often still shows as a change in the bark near the ground. Above it the tree does what no wild beech does. The limbs arch outward and then fall, layer over layer, until the branch tips reach the ground and the whole crown closes into a room. Getting inside and standing at the trunk is the point of the species, and the reason gardeners have kept grafting it since the early nineteenth century.
It grows in the grounds at Situlistraße 73-75 in Freimann, about 70 metres from a copper beech the same ordinance protects on its own account, so the two are one short walk rather than two errands.
No age is recorded. The ordinance names reasons and never dates, so the city has written down that this is the biggest of its kind here without recording a single number about it.
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · Schwabing-Freimann
Purple leaves are a handicap. A copper beech is an ordinary beech carrying a mutation that floods its foliage with anthocyanin, which masks the chlorophyll underneath and cuts the light the leaf can actually put to work. In a wild forest that is a losing hand: purple seedlings are outgrown by green ones and vanish. The tree only exists in numbers because gardeners liked the colour and kept propagating what the forest would have discarded.
This is the second protected beech at Situlistraße 73-75 in Freimann. Munich's 2021 natural monument ordinance lists it separately from the weeping beech about 70 metres away, calling it a dominant tree that defines the local townscape and unique in the area, which for a document that mostly says mighty and dominant counts as enthusiasm.
What the ordinance does not list is a date, a girth or a height. It records reasons for protection and nothing else, and no other source has measured this tree, so the beech is documented in law and entirely undated.
The handicap gets paid off for about a fortnight a year. The new leaves open in late April and early May a thin luminous red you can see the sun through, then thicken and darken all summer towards something close to black. In August it is the heaviest looking thing on the street. In May it is the brightest.
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · Nymphenburg
A small-leaved lime grows on the working grounds of the Nymphenburg Porcelain Manufactory, Bavaria's royal china works, founded in 1747 and still hand-painting porcelain in the same rondell building today. Munich's 2021 natural monument ordinance protects the tree for being dominant and shaping the townscape, the same reasoning it gives dozens of trees across the city, and a local paper listed it among eleven giants declared natural monuments in 2011.
The Nördliches Schlossrondell is one of two crescent buildings curving out from the forecourt of Nymphenburg Palace, built to house the court's workshops rather than its aristocracy. Porcelain has fired here since the manufactory moved onto the grounds in 1761, through a change from crown property to the family firm that runs it now.
The lime stands close enough to the palace park's other protected trees, an oak, a beech and two more limes half a kilometre south, to make a short walk of it. Nobody has dated it. If you have stood under it, or work in the manufactory and can ask, tell us.
Photo: Peterf, CC BY-SA 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) · Maxvorstadt
A mountain tree ended up on a flat city street and outgrew everything on it. Sycamore maples belong to the Alps and the uplands of central Europe, where they root in steep pasture and broken rock; this one stands on the gravel plain the Isar laid down, on Theresienstrasse in Maxvorstadt. Munich's 2021 natural monument ordinance protects it in one line, and that line is a compliment rather than a measurement: a strikingly handsome, dominantly grown tree, effective in the streetscape.
Maxvorstadt was Munich's first planned expansion beyond the medieval walls, a grid drawn from 1805 and now the quarter of the university and the Pinakotheken. Theresienstrasse runs east to west through the middle of it, a long straight of shopfronts, institutes and parked bicycles, and the maple is the one thing on its stretch with a crown worth standing under.
Nobody has put a date on it. The ordinance keeps no age column and no girth column, and no other source names this tree, so all that is on record is that the city looked at it and decided it was worth keeping. If you know when it went in, or have taken a tape around the trunk, tell us and we will add it.
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · Schwanthalerhöhe
Munich's beer gardens are shaded by this species for an engineering reason. Brewers dug ice cellars along the Isar terraces and planted horse chestnuts over the vaults, because the roots run shallow and do no damage below while the leaves throw a dense, low shade that kept the beer cold through August. The tree came from the mountains of the Balkans and reached central Europe in the sixteenth century as a curiosity; Bavaria put it to work.
This one is off duty. It stands on Gollierplatz, the green square at the heart of the Westend, and Munich's 2021 natural monument ordinance protects it as a wide-spreading tree that stands out clearly above the others around it. That is worth knowing before you go, because the square has plenty of trees and only one of them is the one you came for: look for the crown that overtops the rest.
The Westend is a dense grid of tenement blocks thrown up for workers at the end of the nineteenth century, on the rise just above the Theresienwiese, where the Oktoberfest has been held since 1810. Gollierplatz is where the quarter goes to sit down.
The city recorded no age for it and nobody else has published one. If you know the square's history, or the tree's, we would like to hear it.
Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) · Moosach
Munich's protection order calls this tree rare, which is an odd thing to say about a red oak. The species is everywhere in European parks: brought over from eastern North America in the eighteenth century for fast timber and for the autumn colour, and planted by the thousand ever since. What is rare is one allowed to reach full size inside a city. The ordinance says so in five words of German that translate as a very large red oak, rare within the city, and leaves it there.
It stands in Hartmannshofer Park in Moosach, in Munich's north-west, on ground that was estate land before the city reached it. Red oak leaves are the giveaway: big, thin, with bristle tips on each lobe, nothing like the round-lobed native oaks, and in autumn the whole crown goes scarlet rather than the brown that a pedunculate oak settles for. The bark stays smooth and grey far longer than a European oak's, which is another way to be sure you are standing at the right trunk.
No age is recorded anywhere. Red oaks grow fast, so size is a poor guide here, and guessing would be worse than admitting it. If you know when this one was planted, tell us.
White Willow (Salix alba) · Schwabing-Freimann
A white willow is normally one of a crowd. It is the pioneer of the gravel bar, the first thing to root after a flood has scoured the bank, and it grows in thickets because that is how the river plants it. This one grew up alone, and Munich's 2021 natural monument ordinance protects it for exactly that: a mighty, solitary and striking tree, rare within the city at this size.
It stands on the left bank of the Isar in the northern floodplain beyond Freimann, where the river is still allowed to sprawl across shingle and side channels instead of running between engineered banks. The German name for the species is Silberweide, silver willow, and on a windy day you see why: the leaves are white underneath, so a gust turns the whole crown pale in one movement. Nothing else on the riverside path does that.
Willows put on wood fast and hollow out early, which means girth says very little about years here. The city recorded no age, no other source names this tree, and any number we offered would be arithmetic dressed up as a fact. If you have measured it, or watched it through a few floods, we would rather have your account than our guess. The riverside path runs past it and is open all year.
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · Trudering-Riem
If you find this chestnut brown and blotched in August, autumn has nothing to do with it. Since the 1990s a small moth, the horse chestnut leaf miner, has spread across central Europe and mines the leaves of nearly every chestnut on the continent, browning them weeks early. The tree survives it and keeps flowering; it simply stops looking its best at the exact moment people are out in shirtsleeves. Come in May instead, when the candles are up and the leaf miners have not yet got going.
What brought it onto Munich's protected list is bulk. The 2021 ordinance calls it a mighty free-standing tree, rare within the city at this size, and free-standing is the operative word: no neighbours, no competition, a full dome from the ground up. It stands on Kirchtruderinger Strasse, the road named for the church end of Trudering, a farming village east of Munich that had its own parish long before the city grew out to meet it and swallowed it whole.
The register carries no age and nobody else has published one, which is normal for a street tree that was never famous. Trudering keeps its own local history well. If somebody there knows when this chestnut was planted, we would like to put the year on the page.
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · Ramersdorf-Perlach
A beech that still has its lowest branches has never had a neighbour. In a beech wood the low limbs die in the shade of the canopy and drop off, which is why forest beeches stand like grey columns with nothing on them for the first ten metres. An even crown that sweeps all the way down to the grass is the shape of a tree that grew up in the open with all the light to itself, and that is precisely what Munich's 2021 natural monument ordinance records here: a large solitary tree with an even crown reaching down to the ground.
It stands on Kagerstrasse in Ramersdorf-Perlach, in the south-east of the city, on the sort of residential street where a tree this size is the only thing older than the houses. Fagus sylvatica is the species that would cover most of central Europe if we left it alone, and it casts the deepest shade of any tree here, which is why almost nothing grows underneath one.
The city recorded no age and no girth, and no second source names it, so the honest answer is that nobody has dated it. If somebody on Kagerstrasse remembers the tree from childhood, or has put a tape around the trunk, that is already more than any register holds.
Hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) · Ramersdorf-Perlach
Hornbeam is the hardest wood in the European forest, and it was never meant to become a tree like this. Carpenters cut it for the parts that had to survive being hit: mill cogs, the teeth of wooden gearwheels, butchers' blocks, ox yokes. It blunts tools and it burns hotter than oak. The English name says as much twice over, horn for hardness and beam for tree. A wood that useful was normally coppiced or laid into a hedge and cut back every few years, which is why a full-grown solitary hornbeam is a scarce thing.
This one was left alone, and Munich's 2021 natural monument ordinance protects it as a solitary tree with an even crown, rare in Munich at this size. It stands in Wilrampark in Ramersdorf-Perlach, just south of the playground, which makes it easy to find and easy to sit under. Look at the trunk rather than the crown: hornbeam grows fluted, with muscular vertical ridges running up it like tensed sinew, and nothing else in the park has that surface.
No age is on record, here or anywhere else, and the city register keeps no girth column either. If you have put a tape around this trunk, we would like the number for the page.
Photo: Rufus46 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Norway Maple (Acer platanoides) · Untergiesing-Harlaching
Its leaf stalks bleed white when they break. That milky sap is the one reliable way to tell a Norway maple from the sycamore maples it otherwise resembles, and it is the sort of trick worth knowing at a trunk where the leaves are twenty metres up. What you can see from the pavement is scale: Munich's 2021 natural monument ordinance calls it a very mighty, singular tree that defines the square it stands in, which is a lot of authority to hand one maple.
The square is on Mondstrasse in Untergiesing, moon street, on the low ground by the Isar below the terrace that Giesing proper sits on. Giesing was a poor quarter of brickworkers and day labourers long before it was a fashionable one, and its street corners are small, hard and short of green. A tree that determines what one of them looks like is doing real work.
Norway maple is the first of the big shade trees to flower here, in April, in acid yellow-green clusters that open before the leaves and are easy to mistake for early foliage from a distance.
The register records no age, and no other source names this tree. If you have a date for it, send it over.
European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) · Solln
Europe is losing its ash trees, so a big one with a full crown is worth going to look at while it is there. A fungus from east Asia turned up in eastern Europe in the early 1990s, spread across the continent within two decades and has killed ash on a scale that has changed what woods look like in a single human lifetime. Munich's 2021 natural monument ordinance says nothing about any of that. It protects this tree in seven words: a mighty tree with a wide, funnel-shaped crown.
Funnel is the right word for a healthy ash. The limbs leave the trunk at a narrow angle and then swing outward and up, so the whole thing opens like a wide beaker rather than spreading like an oak. Dieback shows in the opposite direction, as thinning from the top down and dead twig ends against the sky, which makes this a tree you can assess for yourself in a few seconds from the pavement.
It stands on Bleibtreuplatz in Solln, a villa suburb of large gardens and quiet corners in Munich's south-west. Nobody has published an age for it. If you pass it often and notice the crown thinning, or if you know when it was planted, tell us and we will update the page.
Photo: Peterf (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) · Solln
The best part of this lime is at the bottom. Munich's 2021 natural monument ordinance gives most trees on its list one clause about size or crown; this one gets a note about its feet, praising a pronounced, wide, chalice-shaped stem base along with the presence it has in the landscape beside the pond. Old limes do that. The trunk flares out at ground level into buttresses that run into the soil like poured wax, and on a big one the flare can be wider than a person can reach around.
It grows at the water on Muttenthalerstrasse in Solln, at the south-western edge of Munich, where the streets are wide and the gardens are old. A lime and a pond is not an accidental combination in Bavaria. The linden was the tree villages planted where they met, danced and held court, and water and a bench tend to follow the same logic.
Go and stand at the base rather than photographing the crown from across the water, because the base is what the city singled out. Age is the one thing missing: the register has no year and no girth for it, and no second source names the tree at all. Anyone with a tape measure can tell us more than the paperwork does.
European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) · Pasing-Obermenzing
This ash branches low, and for an ash that is unusual enough to be the reason it is protected. Grown in a wood, Fraxinus excelsior runs straight up as a clean pole and puts its crown out at the top where the light is; foresters like it for exactly that. This one carries a mighty crown set low on the trunk, which is how Munich's 2021 natural monument ordinance describes it, along with the way it dominates the landscape around it. It means the branches are within sight rather than overhead, and the tree reads as a shape rather than a column.
It stands in Pasinger Stadtpark, the park strung along the Wurm on its way north out of Lake Starnberg, ten minutes on foot from Pasing station. The ash is worth timing: it is the last big tree in the park to come into leaf, often not until well into May, and among the first to drop, which gives it a shorter summer than anything standing next to it. In winter you can pick it out by the buds, matt black and blunt, unlike any other tree here.
The register carries no age or girth for it and no second source names it, so its years are an open question. Answers welcome.
Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) · Pasing-Obermenzing
Landsberger Strasse is the old road west out of Munich, the one that ran to Landsberg and on toward Augsburg before anybody thought of a motorway, and near its far end this lime holds down a corner of Pasing. Munich's 2021 natural monument ordinance protects it as a dominant tree that shapes both the street and the town around it, which is a heavy claim to make about one tree on a busy road. It lands differently here than it would elsewhere in the city, because Pasing was a town in its own right before Munich absorbed it. It still has its own Rathaus, its own market and its own centre of gravity, and the lime stands close to all three.
Large-leaved lime is the German town tree by long habit: it takes hard pruning, poor soil and traffic, it throws new shoots from the base when it is cut back, and it can keep that up for centuries. Its leaves are the bigger of the two native limes, soft and faintly hairy underneath, and it flowers a fortnight or so ahead of the small-leaved lime in early summer.
No age has been recorded, by the city or anyone else. Pasing keeps its history close. If a local knows this tree's, we would like to hear it.
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · Pasing-Obermenzing
Maria-Eich-Strasse means Mary's Oak Street, and this is not that oak. The name belongs to the pilgrimage site at Planegg, out beyond the city boundary at the far end of the road, where by tradition a figure of the Virgin was set into a hollow oak in the early eighteenth century and a chapel grew up around the spot. Whether the street was named for that tree or simply for the place it leads to, the oak standing on it in Obermenzing today is a separate tree with a separate life, and the city protects it on its own account: a dominant tree that shapes the townscape, in the words of Munich's 2021 natural monument ordinance.
Obermenzing is the green, villa-and-garden neighbour of Pasing in Munich's west, and a pedunculate oak here is a native on home ground rather than an import. Quercus robur is the species that carried central Europe: pigs were driven out to fatten on its acorns, ships and roof beams came out of its timber, and a single mature one supports more insect species than almost any other tree here.
The register gives no age and no girth for it. Oaks reward a tape measure more than most. If you bring one, tell us what you find.
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · Laim
Nobody can tell you how old a yew is, and that is a property of the species rather than a gap in the paperwork. Yews grow slowly, then stop and start again for centuries, and the heartwood rots away from the middle while the tree stays perfectly healthy around it, so there is nothing left to count. Every part of it except the red flesh of the berry is poisonous, and it will resprout from a stump that would have finished any other tree here. Taxus baccata is the longest-lived thing that grows in Europe.
This one stands on Laimer Kirchweg, the old church path of a village that Munich has long since grown around, and the city's 2021 natural monument ordinance protects it as a dominant tree that shapes the townscape. Yews and church paths belong together across Europe, usually with the tree older than the building at the end of the walk, though nothing on record connects this one to that habit.
Go in February. A yew keeps its dark, dense, almost black-green all winter, which is unremarkable in July and the only colour on the street in the dead of the year. The register lists no age and no girth, and if you know either, we would like to have it.
Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) · 200-280 years · Hartmannshofen, Moosach
An American red oak thick enough to be one of Munich's largest hides behind a tennis club, a hundred metres north of the Fasanerie restaurant in Hartmannshofer Park, with no sign anywhere pointing to it. The city designated it a natural monument in 2021, citing simply that it is a very large red oak, rare anywhere inside Munich, after a resident first applied for its protection back in 2006. The paperwork took fifteen years to catch up with the tree.
Quercus rubra is native to eastern North America and was planted across German parks and forests from the 18th century on, valued for its fast growth and brilliant autumn colour rather than for any native pedigree. This one has done more with those decades than almost any other red oak in the city: 4.2 metres round at the base and about 30 metres tall, standing in a stretch of forest that has belonged to the Free State of Bavaria rather than the city since well before the park itself existed. A local tree enthusiast who pushed for its protection estimates it at around 250 years old, though nobody has confirmed that with a core sample or a planting record.
The park itself, the Hartmannshofer Wald, only became a public park in the 1960s. Before that it was simply forest, which may be exactly how this one tree got old enough to matter.
Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) · 200 years · Grünwald (municipality south of Munich)
This lime was planted to celebrate a constitution, and it has outlived the kingdom that wrote it. On 20 May 1808 the citizens of Grünwald set it into their market square to mark King Max Joseph's new constitution for the Kingdom of Bavaria. A plaque on the trunk still records the gift.
That gives it something rare among old trees: a birthday. Most trees on this map carry an estimate or a range. This one has a date, which makes it about 218 years old in 2026, and the arithmetic is the whole argument.
It stands in the open where Grünwald's two main streets cross, a large-leaved lime with the town's traffic turning around it. Bavaria protects it twice over, as a natural monument and on the same footing as a listed building, an unusual honour for something that grows.
In the two centuries since, the constitution it was planted for was replaced and the Bavarian monarchy ended in 1918. The lime stayed where the citizens put it, on the square, with its plaque.
Nobody has published its girth or its height. If you pass with a tape measure, tell us what you find.
Grünwald lies about 12 km south of central Munich, so this is a suburban trip rather than a city stroll: tram 25 runs out from the centre, and the Marktplatz is a few minutes on foot from the stop.
Photo: Rufus46 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · Grünwald (municipality south of Munich)
The officials who protect this lime do not agree on which lime it is. The Landkreis München made it a natural monument by an ordinance of 22 February 1982, and the published list of the district's monuments calls it a Winterlinde, a small-leaved lime. The Bavarian state register, at the same spot by the chapel, names it a Sommerlinde, a large-leaved lime. The photographer who documented it in 2021 sided with the small-leaved reading, and so do we, but the dispute is real and still open.
What nobody disputes is where it stands. It grows on the street Auf der Eierwiese, directly beside the little chapel of St. John of Nepomuk, and its crown rises well over the chapel roof. Three separate coordinates, from the register, the list and geotagged photographs, land within a few metres of each other here.
You can settle the species yourself. A small-leaved lime has smaller, neater leaves and flowers in July; a large-leaved lime flowers a few weeks earlier, in June. Stand under it in early summer and the timing tells you. If you know it already, tell us which one it is.
No age, girth or height has been published for it either, so a measurement would be just as welcome.
The chapel is in Grünwald, about 12 km south of central Munich: a suburban trip on tram 25 from the centre, then on foot from the stop.
Photo: Martinus KE (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · Grünwald (municipality south of Munich)
Most protected trees stand in parks or churchyards. This one stands beside a shopping arcade. The Landkreis München lists a single copper beech on Luitpoldweg in Grünwald as a natural monument, and it fills the open space at the western edge of the Schlosspassage.
That is the charm of it. You do not walk into a wood to find this tree. You step off tram 25 at its Grünwald terminus, roughly 100 metres away, and there it is above the forecourt, a tall dome of dark purple leaves among the shopfronts.
Copper beech is a colour form of the ordinary European beech, and the colour runs through the year: the leaves open purple in spring, darken through summer and turn copper before they fall.
The pin is close but not exact. The register gives a point for this one tree, and a 2021 photograph captioned at Luitpoldweg by the Schlosspassage shows it there, but no photograph carries its own position. In practice it matters little: look for the one large purple beech beside the arcade, with a red Japanese maple at its foot. The forecourt belongs to the shopping centre, so we cannot promise it is open at every hour, though the tree is plain to see from the square.
Nobody has published its age, girth or height. If you know any of the three, tell us.
Grünwald is about 12 km south of central Munich, a suburban trip by tram rather than a stroll from the centre.
Photo: Martinus KE (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Oak (Quercus sp.) · Oberhaching (municipality south of Munich)
This oak starts branching so low on its trunk that its crown has room to spread wide, and the photographer who documented it in 2021 left one piece of advice: see it from the west. That is where the spread shows best.
It stands at the side of Bergstraße in Oberhaching, where the road climbs east out of the Gleißental valley and a footpath called the Kirchweg branches off north behind the tree along the edge of the slope. The Landkreis München protects it as a natural monument. Part of the slope wood behind it is protected too, as a separate monument called the Elf Eichen, the Eleven Oaks, so this is plainly a corner where oaks were thought worth protecting.
The register says only Eiche, oak, without naming which one. If you can tell a pedunculate from a sessile oak by its acorn stalks, tell us.
The pin is close but not exact: the register and the district list agree to within two metres, but no photograph confirms the trunk independently. On the ground, look for the broad oak at the roadside exactly where the Kirchweg leaves Bergstraße, rather than the trees in the wood behind it. The address beside it, Bergstraße 7a, is a private house, so look from the road and leave the property alone.
No age, girth or height has been published.
Oberhaching lies about 14 km south of Munich centre, a suburban trip; check MVV for the bus.
Photo: Martinus KE (CC BY-SA 4.0)
European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) · Gräfelfing (municipality west of Munich)
Look up at the top of this ash and you will see a bare dead spire standing out of a green crown. When it was photographed in June 2023 the tree was in full leaf everywhere except that one leader at the summit. Whether storm or disease took it, nobody has said, and we will not guess. What the photograph shows is the rest of the tree alive and leafing.
It is a protected natural monument of the Landkreis München, a European ash at the corner of Wendelsteinstraße and Stefanusstraße in Gräfelfing, close to the bank of the Würm. An information board stands beside it, which is the surest sign you have the right tree. Its trunk leans and forks.
The pin is honest about its limits. The district's list and the Bavarian state register place the tree about 40 metres apart, both at the same junction, so our pin sits between them. At the corner, look for the tall ash with the dead spire and the board beside it.
Nobody has published its age, girth or height. If you know any of them, or if you pass and see how the crown is doing now, tell us.
Gräfelfing lies about 12 km west of central Munich, so this is a suburban trip rather than a city walk. Check the S-Bahn for the way out; we have not timed the journey to the tree.
Photo: Martinus KE (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · Taufkirchen (Landkreis Muenchen)
This oak marks a meeting of waters: it stands where the Entenbach runs into the Hachinger Bach, on the stretch of country between Taufkirchen and Unterhaching. The Landkreis München made it a natural monument in March 2020, and its list describes it by that confluence rather than by a house number.
It is a pedunculate oak, the long-stalked acorn oak of Central Europe, and the photographs taken of it in April 2022 and again in July 2026 show the trunk right on the bank of the stream, bare in spring, under a full green crown in summer. That is the whole of the record. The designation gives no age, no girth and no height, and the ordinance that may explain why it was chosen is no longer online.
So this is one to measure for us. If you carry a tape, a girth at chest height would let us estimate its age, and we would like to know it.
Come along the stream, not the road. The Münchner Straße here has no pavement, while a public path follows the Hachinger Bach past the trunk as part of the signposted Hachinger Bach walking route. From Unterhaching station on the S3 it is roughly 1.5 to 2 km on foot.
Photo: Rufus46 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A day trip away
Dachau old town, 16 km north-west
Silver Lime (Tilia tomentosa) · ~120 years · Dachau old town
This lime has a birth certificate of sorts: an information board gives the year it was planted, 1907. That makes it about 119 years old, and for once that is a date rather than an estimate.
Twenty-six years after it went into the ground, the Nazi regime opened a concentration camp on the edge of this town, and the name Dachau took on the meaning it still carries. The lime grew on in the old town through all of it, and through the liberation in April 1945. Today it stands on the corner of Konrad-Adenauer-Straße and Pfarrstraße, on the square called Widerstandsplatz, Resistance Square.
The Landkreis Dachau made it a natural monument in a 1997 ordinance, which names it a silver lime, a species from south-eastern Europe rather than a native. Its leaves are dark above and felted white beneath, so the crown flickers pale when the wind turns them over. It is also the last lime of the year to flower, in July, after the native limes have finished, and the honey scent carries across the square.
Nobody has published its girth or its height. If you stand under it with a tape measure, tell us what you find.
Dachau lies about 16 km north-west of central Munich: roughly 25 minutes on the S2, then a ten-minute walk from the station.
Photo: Martinus KE (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Lime (Tilia sp.) · 140 years · Dachau old town
This lime was protected as an inn's courtyard tree, and the inn has moved on without it. The county list that made it a natural monument places it in the courtyard of the Unterbräu on Augsburger Straße. A successor inn now trades there, and it no longer runs that yard, so today the tree stands at a street corner rather than in a guest garden.
The same list puts its age at about 140 years. It does not say when that figure was set or how, so read it loosely, somewhere between 120 and 160 years. Even at the low end it was in the ground before the First World War, a few steps off the main street of Dachau's old town, and it has stood there through every chapter of the town's twentieth century since.
The register calls it simply Linde, a lime, without naming which one. If you can tell a small-leaved from a large-leaved lime by the leaf, tell us.
Look for it at the corner of Gottesackerstraße and Färbergasse. Two separate map points for the tree agree to within about 11 metres. We have not seen where the old courtyard's fence runs today, so treat the corner as your viewpoint.
No girth or height has been published. Dachau is about 16 km north-west of central Munich: roughly 25 minutes on the S2, then a kilometre on foot from the station.
Photo: Martinus KE (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · 160 years · Dachau old town
When it was photographed in mid-September 2023, this copper beech already had the thin crown of a tree in November. The photographer said so plainly in his caption: the tree did not look healthy, and its leaves were sparse before autumn leaf fall had even begun. It was alive that summer, in leaf if not in full leaf. How it looks today is something a visitor can tell us better than any record can.
It stands in Dachau's Alter Stadtfriedhof, the old town cemetery, and the county list that protects it as a natural monument gives directions rather than coordinates: about 20 metres inside the Jocherstraße entrance, on the left. Those directions and two separate map points agree on the spot, so this is one tree you will not have to hunt for among the graves.
The same list puts its age at about 160 years. That figure arrives without a date or a method attached, so read it as a band, somewhere between 140 and 190 years. Either way, it has spent well over a century among the town's graves.
A copper beech is the purple-leaved form of the common beech. No girth or height has been published for this one.
This is a working cemetery, so stand quietly and keep to the paths. It is about a kilometre on foot from Dachau station, which the S2 reaches from central Munich in roughly 25 minutes.
Photo: Martinus KE (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Oak (Quercus sp.) · 220 years · Etzenhausen / Leitenberg
By the county's own estimate this oak is about 220 years old, and it lives fifteen metres from a railway embankment north of Dachau. Taken at face value, that puts its first years around 1806, when Bavaria became a kingdom. The figure comes without a date or a method, though, so treat it as a band, somewhere between 180 and 260 years.
It stands on the Leitenweg, a track north of the Leitenberg between Dachau and the village of Prittlbach. The list gives directions rather than coordinates: the north-east corner of a plot at the northern approach to the Leitenberg, about 15 metres from the embankment. Two map points for it sit about 43 metres apart, so our pin is a midpoint. Use the embankment as your guide.
We do not know whether the plot itself is open land, so plan to see the oak from the Leitenweg. If you have been, tell us whether you could walk up to the trunk.
The register says only Eiche, oak, without naming the species. If you can read it from the acorn stalks, tell us that too, along with a girth if you carry a tape.
This is not a stroll from the station. Take the S2 to Dachau, roughly 25 minutes from central Munich, then go about 3 km north on foot or by bike.
Photo: Martinus KE (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Lime (Tilia sp.) · 290 years · Dachau Schlossberg
This is not one tree but a walk of limes clipped into a green tunnel, and by the county's estimate the limes are about 290 years old. The Landkreis Dachau protects it as a single natural monument, a geschnittener Lindenlaubengang, a clipped lime arbour, in the Hofgarten of Schloss Dachau.
That makes it a different kind of old. A lime left alone grows into a tall, rounded crown. These have been cut back and trained into a covered walk you can stand inside. If the county's figure holds, the limes went into the ground around the 1730s, and today they are held to a shape rather than left to grow. The estimate comes without a date or a method, so treat it as a band of roughly 250 to 320 years.
The list calls the trees only Linde, lime, and does not say which kind. If you can tell from the leaves, tell us, and the same goes for a trunk measurement.
The pin marks the palace garden rather than a particular trunk, but a covered lime walk is not something you will miss once you are inside. The garden is public; check its opening hours before you go. Schloss Dachau stands on the hill above the old town, roughly 1.5 km from Dachau station with a climb at the end, and the S2 reaches Dachau from central Munich in about 25 minutes.
Photo: Richard Huber (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Lime (Tilia sp.) · 100 years · Dachau, Etzenhausener Straße
The cross at the foot of this lime still carries a prayer for field and house, written when the ground around it was grain fields. The fields are gone. Today it is a street near Dachau Stadt station, and when this tree was photographed in September 2023 the parked cars stood almost up against its trunk.
That pairing is the reason to come. The Landkreis Dachau protects the lime as a natural monument, and the photograph shows the tree and the wayside cross together, which is also the easiest way to be sure you have found the right one. The cross has outlasted the farming its prayer was written for.
The county list puts the lime at about 100 years, without a date or a method, so read that as a rough band of 90 to 130 years. By that estimate it has stood here through most of Dachau's twentieth century. The list calls it only Linde, a lime, and does not say which kind. If you know, tell us, and a girth or height would be welcome too, since neither has been published.
The list places it on Etzenhausener Straße, about 20 metres south of the turning into Prälat-Pfanzelt-Straße, and two map points agree to within a few metres. Look for the cross first. Dachau is about 25 minutes from central Munich on the S2.
Sauerlach, 20 km south
Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) · 200 years · Sauerlach
Seven trunks rise from one base here, and together they measure about ten and a half metres round. Bavaria's list of remarkable trees calls this lime in Sauerlach a textbook example of multi-stemmed growth, and the figure from 2015 is the girth of all seven taken together, not of one trunk. The village's own Wikipedia article gives the same 10.5 metres as a diameter, which no lime on earth could manage; read it as a circumference.
It was a beer garden tree first. A photograph from 1930 shows it in the beer garden of the Gasthof zur Post. The inn's garden has since given way to a supermarket, and the lime stayed where it was, in front of the shop on Tegernseer Landstraße, across from the Alte Post. It is protected as a natural monument by the Landkreis München.
Its age is put at 180 to 200 years, though both figures trace back to a single source, and nobody records when it was planted. By that reckoning it has stood in the village centre since the early nineteenth century, through every change of use around it.
It is a large-leaved lime, the species that flowers first among Central Europe's limes. The S3 runs from Marienplatz to Sauerlach in about 30 minutes, and the tree is a five-minute walk from the station.
Photo: Rufus46 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Ingelsberg, 20 km east
European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) · 150 years · Ingelsberg (Zorneding)
The Landkreis Ebersberg protects this tree under a name that is also a description: Esche frei im Landschaftsbild stehend, the ash standing free in the landscape. It is natural monument number 41, and it earns the name. It stands alone at the edge of open fields, with a farm track beside it and a wayside cross at its foot, so the whole crown, 21 metres tall, stands clear against the sky.
The list it comes from says it was planted around 1870, which would make it roughly 150 years old, a date that travels through a single chain of sources and should be held loosely. In 2020 its trunk measured 4.90 metres round, a big girth for an ash of that age. If the planting date holds, it went into the ground around the time of the Franco-Prussian War and has spent its whole life marking the edge of the hamlet of Ingelsberg.
That life is not guaranteed. Ash dieback, a fungus that has killed ash trees across Europe, is at work in Bavaria. Photographs from August and December 2024 show this one standing, in full leaf in summer. If you visit, tell us how the crown looks; a report from the field is worth more to us than any register.
Take the S4 or S6 to Zorneding, about 25 minutes from Munich, then walk roughly 2 to 3 km out to Ingelsberg along rural paths. The cross beneath it is your landmark.
Photo: W-R-Hesse-Fotos (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Puch, 26 km west
Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) · 500-1,200 years · Puch (Fürstenfeldbruck)
A king's daughter is said to have lived inside this tree for 35 years. The village of Puch tells it of Blessed Edigna, by tradition a daughter of a French king, who made her home in the hollow trunk and a cell beside it. The plaque gives her years as 1074 to 1109, and a small shrine to her is built into the trunk to this day.
How old the lime really is, nobody can say. The heartwood is gone, so there are no rings to count and nothing to carbon-date. A representative of the Deutsches Baumarchiv put it at 500 to 700 years in 2008; other estimates run to 1,000 or 1,200. Both camps are guessing from a ruin.
It has been pictured since the seventeenth century, including on the Bavarian survey sheet of 1861. A storm in 1880 broke one of its two main limbs, and the rotten part of the trunk was cut away in 1947. The old crown is gone. What stands now is a remnant stem roughly ten metres round, hard to measure because the shrine has grown into it, carrying a dense young crown some 20 metres high.
Farmers once fed its leaves to their cattle as blessed fodder, and since 1959 the village has staged Edigna plays every ten years. Our newest photograph is from 2018; if you have seen it since, tell us how it looks. Allow 45 to 55 minutes from Munich via the S4 to Fürstenfeldbruck.
Photo: GFreihalter (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Obermarbach, 32 km north
Lime (Tilia sp.) · 400 years · Obermarbach (Petershausen)
German Wikipedia calls this one of the most bizarre tree shapes in the country, and it is hard to argue. The Hollow Lime of Obermarbach is less a trunk than a shell of split, gaping wood, standing beside a sunken lane next to the village church of St. Vitus.
Bavaria's list of notable trees gives it a girth of 10.2 metres. Hold that number loosely: on a trunk this hollow and this split, the tape may have gone round a ring of separate pieces rather than one solid column, and the list does not say when it was measured.
The same list puts its age at about 400 years. That is a round estimate rather than a count, so read it as anywhere from 300 to 500. Near the middle of that band, it was already standing when the Thirty Years' War reached Bavaria in the 1630s. The list calls it only a lime and does not say which kind; if you can tell from the leaves, tell us.
It is a protected natural monument. The most recent photographs we can find of it were taken in June 2019, so a word on how it looks today would be welcome.
Obermarbach lies about 33 km north of Munich, in the municipality of Petershausen: a regional train from Munich to Petershausen, then a few kilometres on by bus or bike. It is further out than most trees on this page, and it does not look like any of them.
Photo: Rainer Lippert
Grafing bei Muenchen, 32 km east
Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) · 260 years · Grafing bei Muenchen
Two large-leaved limes stand together at the chapel of St. Aegidius in Grafing, and the larger of them has a trunk 7.90 metres round. Its partner measures 5.45 metres. Both figures come from a measurement taken in 2015 and recorded in Bavaria's list of notable trees, which gives each tree an age of about 260 years.
That age is an estimate, and the list does not say how it was reached, so read it as somewhere between 200 and 320 years. Near the middle of that band, the pair went into the ground in the middle of the eighteenth century, while Bavaria was still ruled by its electors, and they have grown side by side at the same chapel ever since. Landkreis Ebersberg protects them together as natural monument 81: one listing for two trees, which is also how they are best seen, from one spot.
Which of the two is the bigger, the left or the right as you face the chapel, is not recorded in anything we have read. A trunk of nearly eight metres should settle it at a glance; if you go, tell us which side it stands on. The latest photographs we know of date from October 2020, so a word on how both look now would help too.
Grafing is about 33 km east of Munich. The S4 or a regional train runs to Grafing Bahnhof, and the chapel on Am Stadion is roughly a kilometre on foot from there.