What is Oslo's oldest tree?

The Munch-eika, an oak in the Montebello area estimated at 500 to 600 years old with a trunk about eight metres around.

Are Dronningparken's lindens older than the Royal Palace?

Yes. Merchant Bernt Anker planted the linden alley from 1778, while the Royal Palace was not built until 1823-1849, decades later on land already shaped by his garden.

What makes the Botanisk hage ginkgo special?

Planted in 1870, it is believed by the garden's own museum to be the oldest ginkgo tree in Northern Europe.

Norway

Ancient Trees in Oslo

Oslo's remarkable trees span the city's whole social history: a roughly 500-year-old oak in the western suburbs that predates the city's written tree records entirely, a linden avenue a merchant planted decades before the Royal Palace that now surrounds it existed, the birch-ringed square at the heart of Norway's first protected urban neighbourhood, and a ginkgo in the country's oldest botanical garden believed to be the oldest of its kind anywhere in Northern Europe.

Munch-eika

Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 500-600 years · Montebello

Oslo's own city-planning office names this oak the city's oldest tree, roughly 500 to 600 years old with a trunk about eight metres around, growing in the Montebello area on the city's west side. Its name almost certainly points to Edvard Munch, whose home and studio at nearby Ekely stood a short walk from here for the last decades of his life, though the exact naming story is not documented anywhere this project could confirm, only the coincidence of the painter's name and the neighbourhood. What is documented is the oak's remarkable persistence: a tree with this trunk girth would have already been mature when Christiania, as Oslo was then called, was still a modest fortified trading town centuries away from the industrial and cultural boom that eventually brought artists like Munch to its western suburbs. Oslo's municipal magazine on street trees uses the Munch-eika as its lead example of what the city stands to lose when old trees go untended, a reminder that a tree with five centuries behind it can still be brought down by root damage, soil compaction or simple neglect in a matter of years rather than centuries. It survives today as one of very few individual trees in Oslo old enough to predate the city's written records of its own tree population.

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The Linden Alley of Dronningparken

Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · around 240 years · Vika

Before Oslo's Royal Palace existed, this stretch of ground was Sommerro, a meadow the mayor Christian Henrik Stoedt turned into a small rococo garden in 1751. When the merchant Bernt Anker took over the property in 1778, he kept the formal garden but planted a linden avenue through the surrounding land he was reshaping into a more naturalistic park, the alley that still opens today toward Henrik Ibsens gate. The Royal Palace itself would not be built for another half-century, going up between 1823 and 1849 around and beside the park Anker had already shaped; when it was finished, his linden alley became part of the grounds of a building that did not exist when the trees were planted. Not everything from that planting survives: when a new entrance to the National Theatre metro station opened in the park's southwest corner in 1998, the oldest lindens in that stretch were removed to make way for it. The alley that remains is Oslo's clearest surviving link to the city's pre-royal, merchant-era parkland, predating the palace it now appears to belong to by nearly half a century.

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The Birches of Birkelunden

Silver Birch (Betula pendula) · around 160 years · Grunerlokka

A cavalry officer named Thorvald Meyer laid out this park in the 1860s as he subdivided the farmland around it into what became Grunerlokka, one of Oslo's first planned working-class districts, and lined its edges with birch trees, the species that gave the park its name, bjork being Norwegian for birch. Meyer gave the park to the city for free in 1882, and between 1916 and 1920 much of its internal planting was rearranged into a practical playground for the neighbourhood's children, though the perimeter birches from Meyer's original layout mostly stayed in place. In 2006, Birkelunden and the streets and apartment blocks around it became the first protected urban cultural environment in Norway, a designation covering 116 hectares, 139 buildings, the neighbourhood's Paulus Church and its school, with the park's own birch trees, now around 160 years old, standing at the centre of what the protection order is meant to preserve. Grunerlokka has since become one of Oslo's most fashionable neighbourhoods, its industrial-era apartment blocks converted into some of the city's most sought-after addresses, but the birches ringing the square are the one feature that connects today's cafes and boutiques back to Meyer's 1860s farmland subdivision without needing a plaque to explain it.

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The Ginkgo of Botanisk Hage

Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · around 156 years · Toyen

Norway's oldest botanical garden, founded in 1814 on land the newly created University of Oslo assigned to its first botany professor, Christen Smith, holds what its own museum believes to be the oldest ginkgo tree anywhere in Northern Europe. It was planted in 1870 behind what would become the Victoria House, a tropical glasshouse built six years later specifically to grow and display the enormous Victoria water lily, and the ginkgo has spent the century and a half since then growing into the garden's largest specimen of its kind. Ginkgo biloba survived essentially unchanged for over 200 million years in the fossil record before nearly disappearing everywhere except a few pockets of China, which is why Europeans often call it a living fossil or, in Norwegian, a temple tree, a name reflecting the species' long cultivation around Buddhist and Confucian temple grounds in East Asia. The Victoria House itself marked its 150th anniversary in 2026, a reminder that even the garden's celebrated glasshouse is younger than the tree growing quietly behind it. Ginkgos are famously resistant to pollution, pests and disease, among the reasons this one has outlasted several rebuilding phases of the garden around it since 1870.

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Frequently asked

What is Oslo's oldest tree?: The Munch-eika, an oak in the Montebello area estimated at 500 to 600 years old with a trunk about eight metres around.
Why is it called Munch-eika?: The name almost certainly refers to painter Edvard Munch, whose home and studio at nearby Ekely stood a short walk away, though the exact naming story is not documented.
Are Dronningparken's lindens older than the Royal Palace?: Yes. Merchant Bernt Anker planted the linden alley from 1778, while the Royal Palace was not built until 1823-1849, decades later on land already shaped by his garden.
What makes the Botanisk hage ginkgo special?: Planted in 1870, it is believed by the garden's own museum to be the oldest ginkgo tree in Northern Europe.
More on the oldest tree: What is the oldest tree in Oslo? The full answer, with map and directions.
More like this: Browse themed collections of remarkable trees.
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Walk 3 of these trees about 4.7 km, 1h 3m on foot