What is the oldest tree in Paris?

A black locust planted in 1601 in what is now Square Rene-Viviani, opposite Notre-Dame. Jean Robin, the king's herbalist, raised it from American seed, and it still flowers every spring.

Where is the best place to see old trees in Paris?

The Jardin des Plantes: three of the ten trees on this list grow there, including a 1636 black locust and the last plane tree Buffon is known to have planted.

Are the remarkable trees of Paris free to visit?

All ten on this list are free. They stand in public parks, squares and along avenues, and every one is a short walk from a metro or RER station.

How does Paris protect its remarkable trees?

The city keeps an open register of its 200,000 street and park trees and gives a select few an official remarkable tree classification, which brings protection and dedicated care.

France

Ancient Trees in Paris

Paris treats its trees as part of the civic record: the city logs every one of its 200,000 street and park trees in an open register and stamps a select few as officially remarkable. Its two oldest trees are father and son, black locusts raised four centuries ago from American seed by the royal herbalist Jean Robin and his son Vespasien, and both still flower every spring. These ten include the city's oldest tree, its thickest, its tallest, and an address that has held an elm since the Middle Ages. Every one is a metro ride away.

This page is awaiting curation. Facts have been researched and cross-referenced, but the final human review is still in progress.

Photo: Ordifana75, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Robinier of Square Rene-Viviani

Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) · 425 years · Latin Quarter, 5th arrondissement

The oldest tree in Paris was planted in 1601, before the Mayflower sailed. Jean Robin, herbalist to King Henri IV, raised it from seed sent from the Appalachians by the English naturalist John Tradescant. The entire genus Robinia was later named after him. The tree stands in a small square facing Notre-Dame, which had already stood for centuries when the sapling went into the ground. It has since lived through the Commune, lost its crown to a German shell in the First World War, and watched the cathedral burn in 2019. Concrete props now hold up its heaviest branches and ivy hides much of the trunk, but it still flowers every spring. Parisians walk past it daily without a glance. It is protected by a low fence and a plaque that undersells it considerably. In 2021 National Geographic profiled it as a lesson in urban resilience, four centuries of city life absorbed by one imported American tree.

Access: Free, public square, open dailyGetting there: Saint-Michel Notre-Dame (RER B/C, Metro 4), 3 min walk

Full story, map and directions for The Robinier of Square Rene-Viviani

Photo: Tangopaso, Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)

The Cedar of Jussieu

Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) · 290 years · Jardin des Plantes, 5th arrondissement

Legend says this cedar crossed the Channel in a hat. In 1734 the botanist Bernard de Jussieu carried two seedlings from England to Paris, and when the pot broke on the journey he is said to have finished the trip with a tree cradled in his tricorne. The story is probably embellished, which the Museum's own historians admit, but the tree is real enough: the oldest cedar of Lebanon in France, planted on the slope of the labyrinth in the royal medicinal garden that became the Jardin des Plantes. It was a sapling when Louis XV ruled, stood through the Revolution while the garden's aristocratic patrons lost their heads, and watched the menagerie fill with animals confiscated from Versailles. Nearly three centuries on, its trunk is a metre and a half thick and its flat crown is visible across the garden. A plaque at its base records the planting date for anyone who thinks to look up from the path.

Access: Free, Jardin des Plantes open dailyGetting there: Jussieu (Metro 7/10) or Gare d'Austerlitz, 5 min walk

Full story, map and directions for The Cedar of Jussieu

The Second Robinier

Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) · 390 years · Jardin des Plantes, 5th arrondissement

Paris's second oldest tree is the son of its oldest. In 1636 Vespasien Robin, botanist to the king and son of Jean Robin, took a cutting from his father's black locust and planted it in the brand new royal medicinal garden. The father tree still stands two kilometres away at Square Rene-Viviani. The son has now been growing for close to four centuries in what became the Jardin des Plantes, making the pair almost certainly the oldest parent and child trees in any European city. It was already a mature tree when Buffon ran the garden in the 1700s and when the Museum of Natural History was founded during the Revolution. Like its father it is propped, scarred and still flowering. Botanists still take cuttings from both trees, which means the Robin family line, brought from America as a handful of seeds, keeps spreading four hundred years on. Few of the garden's seven million yearly visitors realize the unassuming acacia is nearly the oldest thing in it.

Access: Free, Jardin des Plantes open dailyGetting there: Jussieu (Metro 7/10), 5 min walk

Full story, map and directions for The Second Robinier

The Buffon Plane

Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 240 years · Jardin des Plantes, 5th arrondissement

In 1785, four years before the Revolution, the naturalist Buffon planted three oriental planes in the garden he had run for half a century. This is the survivor. Buffon was then the most famous scientist in Europe, author of a 36 volume natural history that scandalized the Church by suggesting the Earth was far older than Genesis allowed. He died in 1788 and missed the Terror by five years; his son went to the guillotine. The tree his gardeners set in the ground kept growing through all of it. Oriental planes were admired in antiquity, and the Romans planted them across their empire for shade. This one received the national Remarkable Tree label in 2001. It stands near the garden's plane alley, wide trunked and mottled, old enough that the institution around it has changed its name three times while the tree kept its place. Its two siblings from the 1785 planting are gone, which makes the survivor the last living tree Buffon is known to have planted.

Access: Free, Jardin des Plantes open dailyGetting there: Gare d'Austerlitz (Metro 5/10, RER C), 4 min walk

Full story, map and directions for The Buffon Plane

The Great Plane of Parc Monceau

Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 210 years · 8th arrondissement

The thickest tree in Paris has a waistline of seven metres. Planted in 1814, the year Napoleon abdicated and the allied armies camped in the city, this oriental plane grew up in what was then the private pleasure garden of the Orleans family. Parc Monceau had been laid out as an aristocratic fantasy of ruins and follies, and the plane outgrew all of them. It is now 31 metres tall with a crown to match, the largest of its species in the city. The park around it became public under Haussmann in 1861, and the tree has since shaded Proust, who walked here as a boy, and several generations of the best dressed joggers in Paris. Its bark peels in grey and cream patches and its lower branches are thicker than most full grown street trees. The city lists it among its officially remarkable trees. Stand at the trunk and look up: the first branch is higher than the surrounding lampposts.

Access: Free, park open dailyGetting there: Monceau (Metro 2), at the park gates

Full story, map and directions for The Great Plane of Parc Monceau

The Sequoia of Buttes-Chaumont

Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · 150+ years · 19th arrondissement

A Californian giant grows on a former gypsum quarry in working class Paris. When Napoleon III opened the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in 1867, his engineers had just finished transforming a scarred industrial pit into a romantic landscape of cliffs, waterfalls and a temple on a crag. Among the plantings was a sequoia from the Sierra Nevada, a species that had only been described by Western botanists fifteen years earlier and was the horticultural sensation of the age. It is now the tallest tree in Paris at over 35 metres, with a trunk approaching five metres around. In its native range such a tree would be a juvenile; sequoias live for three thousand years, which means this one could still be standing when every building visible from the park has been replaced. The species name honours Sequoyah, the inventor of the Cherokee writing system. The park's chief gardeners have called it the crown of their collection.

Access: Free, park open dailyGetting there: Botzaris or Buttes-Chaumont (Metro 7bis)

Full story, map and directions for The Sequoia of Buttes-Chaumont

The Elm of Saint-Gervais

Field Elm (Ulmus minor) · 90 years (site planted since the Middle Ages) · Le Marais, 4th arrondissement

This is the youngest tree on this list and the oldest address. An elm has stood on this exact spot in front of the Saint-Gervais church since the Middle Ages, and for centuries it was where the neighbourhood settled its affairs. Debts were repaid under the elm on agreed days, judges heard disputes in its shade, and the phrase attendez-moi sous l'orme, wait for me under the elm, entered French as a way of saying you might be waiting a while. The medieval tree's successors appear in old engravings and even in the wrought iron balconies of the surrounding buildings, where the elm motif was worked into the metal in the 1730s. The Revolution felled the tree then standing, allegedly for cannon carriages. The current elm was planted in 1935, a young stand-in occupying one of the longest continuously treed spots in Europe. The building behind it has hosted a church since the 4th century.

Access: Free, public squareGetting there: Hotel de Ville (Metro 1/11), 3 min walk

Full story, map and directions for The Elm of Saint-Gervais

The Caucasian Elm of Avenue Foch

Caucasian Elm (Zelkova carpinifolia) · 175 years · 16th arrondissement

The grandest avenue in Paris keeps its most interesting tree off the main carriageway. Avenue Foch, 120 metres wide and lined with the most expensive apartments in the city, was laid out in the 1850s as the Avenue de l'Imperatrice, the ceremonial route from the Arc de Triomphe to the Bois de Boulogne. Its lower stretch served as a tree nursery, and a Caucasian elm planted there in 1852 simply never left. The species comes from the mountains between the Black and Caspian Seas and is rare in western Europe. This specimen is now 30 metres tall with a fluted, muscular trunk nearly four metres around, one of the finest of its kind in France. It has watched the avenue change from imperial parade ground to Belle Epoque promenade to the discreet fortress of embassies and old money it is today. The city has classified it among its officially remarkable trees.

Access: Free, public avenue side lawnsGetting there: Porte Dauphine (Metro 2), 2 min walk

Full story, map and directions for The Caucasian Elm of Avenue Foch

The Plane of Parc Montsouris

London Plane (Platanus x hispanica) · 185 years · 14th arrondissement

This plane tree is older than the park around it. Planted in 1840, it was a 30 year old tree when Napoleon III's engineers began carving Parc Montsouris out of old quarries and windmill land in the 1860s, and they built the park around trees like this one. It is now the heavyweight of the 14th arrondissement: six metres around the trunk and 30 metres tall, officially classified as remarkable by the city. Parc Montsouris became the southern anchor of Haussmann's plan to give every quarter of Paris an English style landscape park, and students from the nearby Cite Universitaire have been reading under this tree for a century. The RER line runs in a cutting through the park, which means several million commuters a year pass within metres of one of the oldest planted trees in southern Paris without knowing it is there. The city classified it formally among its remarkable trees, one of only a handful in the south of Paris.

Access: Free, park open dailyGetting there: Cite Universitaire (RER B), 2 min walk

Full story, map and directions for The Plane of Parc Montsouris

The Sophora by the Lake

Japanese Pagoda Tree (Styphnolobium japonicum) · 150 years · 19th arrondissement

Some trees earn their place through size, this one through posture. The Japanese pagoda tree at the edge of the Buttes-Chaumont lake was planted in 1873, six years after the park opened, and has spent 150 years leaning slowly toward the water. It is short for a remarkable tree, ten metres, but its trunk is nearly four metres around and its low, twisting silhouette against the lake and the artificial cliff behind it has made it one of the most photographed trees in the park. Pagoda trees reached Europe from China in the 1740s via a Jesuit missionary's seeds, and Paris planted them enthusiastically in its new parks. This one grew up alongside the Third Republic, survived both sieges of Paris in 1870 and 1871 while the park was barely three years old, and now shades rowers and picnickers on the same bank. The city lists it among its officially classified remarkable trees.

Access: Free, park open dailyGetting there: Buttes-Chaumont (Metro 7bis), 5 min walk

Full story, map and directions for The Sophora by the Lake

Going there? Download all 10 trees as a map file and open it in Google Maps, Organic Maps or any hiking app. Works offline, no app needed.

Frequently asked

What is the oldest tree in Paris?: A black locust planted in 1601 in what is now Square Rene-Viviani, opposite Notre-Dame. Jean Robin, the king's herbalist, raised it from American seed, and it still flowers every spring.
Where is the best place to see old trees in Paris?: The Jardin des Plantes: three of the ten trees on this list grow there, including a 1636 black locust and the last plane tree Buffon is known to have planted.
Are the remarkable trees of Paris free to visit?: All ten on this list are free. They stand in public parks, squares and along avenues, and every one is a short walk from a metro or RER station.
How does Paris protect its remarkable trees?: The city keeps an open register of its 200,000 street and park trees and gives a select few an official remarkable tree classification, which brings protection and dedicated care.
More on the oldest tree: What is the oldest tree in Paris? The full answer, with map and directions.
More like this: Several of these trees also appear in Europe's 10 Most Remarkable Ancient Trees.
More cities: Ancient trees in Amsterdam · Ancient trees in Lisbon · Ancient trees in London

Know a tree that belongs on this list? Tell us: hello@ancienttrees.app. Suggestions feed curation; the list itself stays editorial.