Copenhagen's oldest trees inside the city belong to named people: a sailor's mulberry planted for Christian IV's silk venture, the cycad Frederik Liebmann carried home from Mexico in 1842, Thorvaldsen's black locust. The biggest and oldest are not in the city at all. Three ancient oaks stand in the parkland 11 to 13 km north, in and around the royal deer park at Klampenborg, and one of them is over ten metres round and has stood there since roughly the year 1200. Those three are a half day out, not a city walk.
0 / 16 bezocht in Copenhagen
1
The Mulberry of Proviantgarden
White Mulberry (Morus alba) · 350-420 years · Slotsholmen
King Christian IV tried to build a Danish silk industry the way his contemporaries elsewhere in Europe were doing it, by planting mulberry trees to feed silkworms, and this is the one tree from that entire royal venture that anyone can still point to. It stands today at Proviantgarden, part of the naval arsenal Christian IV built on Slotsholmen from 1603 to supply his warships, on ground that once fronted a working harbor basin where vessels docked to be provisioned and armed. Tradition credits a sailor who brought it home from Asia rather than a court gardener, and it has stood long enough to have watched those same tall ships come and go for provisions centuries before Slotsholmen became the seat of Denmark's parliament and courts. The Danish silk venture itself mostly failed; Copenhagen's climate never suited silkworms the way Christian IV hoped, and the street name Silkegade nearby is now the closest most Copenhageners get to the story. This tree is the exception, a specimen one detailed historical account describes as having remarkable vitality, still leafing out every spring in a courtyard surrounded by 17th-century naval buildings that have long since changed jobs, now government offices rather than stores for rope and ships' biscuit.
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2
The Ancient Cycad of the Palm House
Mexican Cycad (Dioon edule) · around 184 years · Indre By
In 1842, the Danish botanist Frederik Liebmann sailed to Mexico and came home with, among other specimens, a small cycad that looked more like a stunted pineapple than anything resembling a tree. It has spent nearly two centuries since then growing at its own unhurried pace in Copenhagen's Botanical Garden, first at the garden's earlier city-centre site and then, from 1874, in the Palm House built specifically to keep tropical and subtropical plants alive through Danish winters. Cycads are not actually related to palms or ferns despite resembling both; they are among the oldest living groups of seed plants on Earth, largely unchanged since long before flowering plants existed, which makes a 184-year-old specimen barely middle-aged by the standards of its own family. Liebmann died in 1856 at just 43, only 14 years after bringing the plant home, but his cycad has outlived him by more than a century and a half and remains, by the garden's own account, its oldest living specimen and one of its genuine star attractions, a slow-growing plant that has simply outlasted everyone who ever went looking for one.
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3
Thorvaldsen's Robinia
Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) · around 185 years · Slotsholmen
Bertel Thorvaldsen spent more than 40 years in Rome becoming Europe's most celebrated Neoclassical sculptor before returning home to Copenhagen in 1838 to a hero's welcome, and this multi-stemmed black locust growing beside the museum built to house his life's work is said to have come home with him, grown from seed he carried back from Italy. Denmark's dendrological society surveyed the tree in 1995 and recorded a trunk over three metres around, splitting into several stems rather than one, and estimated its age at up to 155 years at that time, consistent with a planting soon after Thorvaldsen's actual return. That would put the tree, and not just the museum, among the direct physical legacies of a sculptor whose bronze and marble work now sits in collections from the Vatican to Warsaw. Black locust is not a species anyone would plant deliberately for its connection to fine art. It is a hardy, fast-growing tree valued more for binding loose soil and producing useful timber than for looking distinguished, which makes its adoption into Thorvaldsen's own story feel almost like an accident that stuck, a workmanlike species growing beside one of Europe's grandest personal museums, surveyed precisely enough by Danish tree recorders in 2008 to give this project one of its few confirmed coordinates.
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4
The Husalle Lindens
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · around 300-360 years · Indre By
Kongens Have is Copenhagen's oldest public park, laid out from 1606 for King Christian IV beside his new Rosenborg Castle, and its formal linden avenues were planted soon after: Kavalergangen and Damegangen, the two clipped alleys nearest the castle, date to around 1664 and 1700. Almost none of those original trees survive; both avenues have been replanted more than once in the four centuries since. Husalle, a third avenue running parallel to the garden's main axis a little further north, has fared differently: its lindens are described by garden historians as among the oldest living trees in Denmark, having escaped the repeated replacements that emptied the more formal avenues nearer the castle of their original planting. The garden itself has survived far more than ordinary wear. It has hosted royal pleasure grounds, public promenades, and, in recent years, a summer sound installation that lets speakers hidden in ten of its trees tell stories to anyone who walks close enough to trigger them, a very modern use for trees old enough to have shaded Danish kings centuries before recorded sound existed. Husalle's lindens do their storytelling the old way, simply by having outlasted almost everything planted around them.
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5
The Temple Tree of Landbohøjskolens Have
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · roughly 140-145 years · Frederiksberg C
This ginkgo is male, and the female it pollinates lives on the other side of the street. The two trees have never touched. The university library, writing up the garden's own history, calls it the largest ginkgo in the collection and gives 1883 as its planting year, which would make it about 143. That date comes from that one source and nowhere else, so read it as the garden's account rather than a measured fact.
It is planted in the middle of a large stone mound, which is a strange thing to do to a tree and suits this one. Ginkgo biloba is the last surviving member of a lineage older than flowering plants, and the Danish name for it, tempeltræet, points at the temple courtyards in China and Japan where the final populations were kept alive by monks while the wild ones disappeared. The garden around it was laid out in 1858 for the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural College and has been legally protected since 1965.
Protection is not immortality. The blood beech planted the year the garden opened, which the official heritage listing still describes as the thickest tree here, was felled in 2018. Nothing suggests the ginkgo has gone the same way and the species is famously hard to kill, but the newest dated confirmation we could find of this one is not recent. The garden is free and open from sunrise to sunset.
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6
The Handkerchief Tree of Assistens
Handkerchief Tree (Davidia involucrata) · not documented · Nørrebro
What looks like flowers on this tree are leaves. For roughly two weeks in May the handkerchief tree hangs hundreds of paired white bracts through its crown, each pair a modified leaf wrapped around a small dark ball of actual flower, and Danish names it better than English does: duetræ, the dove tree. Davidia involucrata grows wild in the mountains of western China and reached Western cultivation only in 1904, through the plant hunter Ernest Wilson. It is still an uncommon thing to find in Denmark, and this one is multi-stemmed, so in May the bracts come at you from several directions at once.
Nobody wrote down when it was planted. The Danish Dendrological Society surveyed Assistens in November 2019, put a GPS point on this tree, measured 1.4 metres around its stems and recorded it alive and healthy. That is the honest limit of what is known here: a girth, not an age. The range on this page is inferred from that measurement and from how recently the species arrived in Danish gardens, not read off any record.
It stands in section A of a cemetery Copenhagen treats as a park. People run, read and eat their lunch here, a few hundred metres from the graves of Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard.
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7
The Weeping Beech of Assistens
Weeping Beech (Fagus sylvatica 'Pendula') · not documented · Nørrebro
Every weeping beech is a graft, and on this one the join is in plain sight. About a metre up the trunk there is a visible union where a cutting of the pendulous form was fixed onto ordinary beech rootstock, and the surveyor who measured the tree in November 2019 noted that the grafted top is now putting on wood faster than the stock beneath it, so the trunk steps outward where the two meet. Look for that step before you look at the curtain.
The same survey recorded something less comfortable: a large wound at the base of the trunk. The tree was logged as alive, 3.29 metres round and 15 metres tall, but it is a healthy crown standing over an open injury, which is worth knowing rather than glossing over.
Weeping beech became a Danish cemetery fashion in the nineteenth century under the name sørgebøg, mourning beech, planted to hang over a grave the way a mourner leans over it. No planting date survives for this one. The 80 to 150 years on this page is worked back from the girth, not counted.
It stands in section B, just right of the Kapelvej entrance, which makes it the first serious tree most visitors to Assistens Kirkegård walk straight past.
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8
The Great Maple of Assistens
Sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) · not documented · Nørrebro
The thickest tree at Assistens is also the least exotic species in it. At 4.19 metres round, this sycamore out-measures every tree the Danish Dendrological Society registered inside these walls, including the rarities people actually come to see, and it does it as a common European maple that seeds itself into any gap it can find. Twenty-two and a half metres tall, one trunk to about two metres up and then a fork into two, alive and healthy at the November 2019 survey, rated regionally noteworthy.
Assistens was not built for strolling. It opened in 1757 outside the city ramparts as an overflow burial ground, taking the dead that Copenhagen's crowded parish churchyards could no longer hold, and the famous names arrived later. The city then grew out past it, Nørrebro packed in around it, and the place slowly turned into what it is now: a walled park with graves in it, where on a warm afternoon the living comfortably outnumber the mourners.
No planting date exists for this maple, and the 100 to 180 years given here is inferred from its girth rather than counted. What is certain is the measurement, taken with GPS in the field, and that nothing else registered in this cemetery is thicker. Section C, a little southwest of the section's centre.
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9
The Beech by the Boat Trip
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · not documented · Frederiksberg
This beech is registered under the name of a boat trip. Danish dendrologists filed it as Bøgen ved Bådfarten, the beech by the boat trip, which makes it the easiest tree on this list to find: walk to the jetty in Frederiksberg Have where the flat-bottomed boats set off around the canals, and the tree is the big one standing over you. Its trunk is 4.68 metres round and 1.49 metres across, measured in October 2016 and recorded alive.
The water it stands beside is the reason the garden looks the way it does. Frederiksberg Have began around 1700 as a Baroque layout of straight lines below the royal palace, then was redrawn between 1798 and 1804 into a romantic landscape of winding canals, islands and staged views, which is the fashion this beech grew up inside. The garden is protected under Danish conservation law and free to walk into.
Its age is not documented anywhere. The 120 to 220 years here comes from girth alone, and the garden's own heritage listing is careful on the point: the trees it names as three centuries old are the lindens on Mathildehøj, not this beech. Only one other tree in Frederiksberg Have carries a thicker trunk, and it is a short walk away in the same garden.
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10
The Pedunculate Oak of Frederiksberg Have
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · not documented · Frederiksberg
This oak has no recorded birthday, but the garden gives it a ceiling. Frederiksberg Have was laid out as royal ground around 1700 and rebuilt between 1798 and 1804 into the romantic landscape park it still is, so whatever the tree's exact age, it cannot be older than the garden that had to exist before anyone planted in it. What was measured rather than guessed: 4.95 metres round, 28.8 metres tall, 1.58 metres through, surveyed by the Danish Dendrological Society in October 2016 and rated municipally noteworthy. That is the thickest trunk of any tree on this list standing inside the city itself; the oaks out in the deer park north of town are thicker again.
The 130 to 250 years on this page is arithmetic on that girth against how fast a parkland oak puts on wood, not a date from any record, and it should be read as the wide guess it is. A pedunculate oak growing in the open with room on every side thickens faster than one shut into a wood, which is exactly the situation here, and one reason the upper end of that range is probably generous.
The garden around it is public, protected and busy: lawns, canals, the palace up on its hill, boats in summer. The oak has watched the whole thing turn from a royal retreat into the city's back garden.
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11
The Honey Locust of Assistens
Honey Locust (Gleditsia triacanthos) · at least 85 years, likely older · Nørrebro
Someone has been keeping notes on this tree since 1941. That year a Danish gardening magazine ran a feature on beautiful trees and included a honey locust in section E of Assistens cemetery. In 1949 Jens Østergaard came to measure it for a nationwide survey of Gleditsia triacanthos in Danish gardens, published in the Dendrological Society's 1952 yearbook: twelve metres tall, standing on what the surveyor recorded as former rampart ground, clay loam, listed as site number six of only thirty-five in the whole country. In November 2019 the Society came back with a GPS and a tape. Sixteen metres, 1.18 metres round, alive and healthy.
Four metres of growth in seventy years is exactly what this species should manage, which is what makes the paper trail worth more than a plaque. The same tree, in the same spot, written up three times across eighty years by people with no reason to exaggerate.
The thorns are what to look for, and you will have to look up. Honey locust usually arms its trunk with branched spikes at chest height. This one carries only a few, sitting two and a half to three metres up, out of reach and easy to walk straight past.
Assistens opened in 1760 as a burial ground for the poor, on ground outside the city ramparts, and Hans Christian Andersen lies a few minutes' walk from here. The honey locust was rare enough in Denmark to be worth cataloguing nationally. It still is.
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12
The Pacifier Tree
Hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) · not documented · Frederiksberg
Every November this hornbeam gets harvested. Since 2004 parents in Frederiksberg have brought toddlers here to tie up the pacifier they have agreed to give up, and once a year the whole crop comes down so the tree can start again. Danish dendrologists list it on their national register under the name everyone else uses: Suttetræet, the pacifier tree.
That register entry is unusual for what it leaves out. Every other tree recorded in Frederiksberg Have carries a height, a girth, often a planting year. This one carries none of them. Nobody has measured it and nobody has dated it, so read any age attached to this tree as a guess rather than a measurement. It is a mature garden hornbeam. That is the whole of what is known.
Which is rather the point. Carpinus betulus is the workhorse of formal European gardens, planted by the thousand for its density and its patience under the shears, and Frederiksberg Have has been royal ground since about 1700 and a romantic landscape park since its rebuilding between 1798 and 1804. The garden's history is documented down to the decade. The tree's is not. What it has instead is twenty-two years of small plastic objects and a steady supply of three-year-olds making a decision.
Come in autumn if you want to see it fully loaded. The November harvest clears it back to bare branches.
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13
The Sky-Reacher of Assistens
Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) · not documented · Nørrebro
Skyrækker, the Danish name for this species, means sky-reacher. At 15.5 metres this one does not out-top the big beeches and maples around it, but at 4.01 metres round it is the largest exotic tree the Danish Dendrological Society registered inside these cemetery walls, and the only Ailanthus they found here at all.
It also comes with an open question. The surveyors who measured it in November 2019 logged its condition as levende, svag: alive, but weak. They noted severe bark scraping low on the western side of the trunk, the kind of injury that interrupts the traffic between roots and crown. Nothing found since updates that note, so what stands behind this entry is one careful observation now about seven years old. If you go and find it changed, tell us.
No source gives its age either. Somewhere between sixty and a hundred and twenty years is an inference from girth alone, not a record.
Ailanthus altissima reached Europe from China in the eighteenth century as a fashionable exotic and is now better known for pushing up through railway ballast and cracked concrete anywhere it can get a root down. This one was planted on purpose, in a cemetery that collected rarities, and the handkerchief tree and the ginkgo a few paths away come from the same appetite. Assistens works as a public park as much as a burial ground, and that collection is a large part of why.
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Foto: Niels Orbesen (CC BY-SA 3.0)
14
Skovfogedegen
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 800 years · Klampenborg
Ten metres and 42 centimetres around, and empty in the middle. Skovfogedegen has lost its entire heartwood to rot, which an oak can survive: water and sugars travel in the thin growing layer just under the bark, so a hollow trunk is a shell that still works. Three dated Danish sources put the tree here since around the year 1200: the national encyclopedia, the historical-sites database Historisk Atlas, and a 2025 feature in the newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad. That makes it roughly 800 years old, and by a wide margin the oldest and thickest tree on this list. One untraced web page gives 500 years instead. Nothing stands behind it, and the three that agree are dated and named.
The hollow has been put to use. Johan Georg Weissler, a Catholic forest ranger who died in 1854, used the cavity as a private prayer chamber in the early 1800s, and skovfoged, forest ranger, is where the tree's name comes from. At other times the hole held peat.
The Danish Dendrological Society measured it at 12.9 metres tall and logged it living but weak in 2010. A photograph taken in March 2025 shows the same hollow trunk still standing. It is not a city tree: it grows beside the road Strandvejen at the edge of Jaegersborg Dyrehave, 11 km north of Copenhagen, opposite Bellevue Strand.
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Foto: Finn Årup Nielsen (CC BY-SA 4.0)
15
Klopstocks Eg
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · up to about 800 years · Lyngby Aamose, Kongens Lyngby
Denmark protected this oak by law in 1956 and still cannot date it within four centuries. The Danish Dendrological Society's register gives 800 years as a maximum rather than an estimate, which is a different kind of number: the most the tree could be, not the best guess at what it is. So the range here runs from 400 to 800 years, and nobody has narrowed it.
What has been measured: 6.05 metres round, 1.93 metres through, alive at the last field report. A storm in 2013 broke off a large branch and the tree carried on without further loss.
The name belongs to Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, the German poet who came to Denmark in 1751 at the invitation of Frederik V, stayed twenty years, and spent his summers at Gramlille on Lyngby Hovedgade, a short walk from here. Nothing is recorded about what he did under this particular tree. It carries his name the way a street does, by association with the neighbourhood he lived in. It has also been called Monrads Eg, after D.G. Monrad. A memorial plaque went up in 1984.
The oak stands right beside Prinsessestien, a public path through Lyngby Aamose in the Molleaadalen valley, about 12 km northwest of Copenhagen and a quarter of an hour on foot from Sorgenfri station.
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16
Englaenderegen
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 300 years · Jaegersborg Dyrehave (the royal deer park)
This oak was dying, and treasure hunters saved it by accident. Generations of digging around its roots broke up the packed soil and let air back in, which is what the Danish Dendrological Society's register credits with its recovery. Nobody was trying to help the tree. They were looking for a chest of money.
The name, Englaenderegen, the Englishman's oak, comes from the British siege of Copenhagen in 1807. Two soldiers, tired of service, are said to have stolen their regiment's pay chest and buried it beside a freestanding oak northeast of the Hermitage. Neither came back for it, and one confessed on his deathbed to a priest. Searches followed for over a hundred years, including one made at the request of Queen Victoria, and nothing has ever been found. The chest is legend. The holes were real, and they are the part that mattered.
The register measures the trunk at 5.46 metres round and 1.74 metres through, and dates it at 240 to 360 years using a growth formula applied to 1995 measurements, which puts it at roughly 270 to 390 now. It stands by the pond Magasindammen in Jaegersborg Dyrehave, the royal deer park north of Copenhagen, and the Nature Agency marks the site wheelchair accessible. Getting there is the long part: 35 to 40 minutes on foot from Klampenborg station, past Eremitageslottet.
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