The City Hall Maple

In 1918, the year the Act of Union made Iceland a sovereign state in union with Denmark, a sycamore maple went into the ground at the corner of Suðurgata and Vonarstræti, on a small patch of grass squeezed against what would later become a parking area. It grew alongside the birth of modern Icelandic statehood, was named the country's Tree of the Year in 1994, and by every recent assessment is still, in the Icelandic forestry society's own phrase, healthy as a horse, crown maintained, foliage vigorous, standing its ground on a corner most passers by would assume was chosen for parking rather than for a tree planted before the country existed in its current form. Sycamore maple is not native to Iceland any more than most of the species on this list, and a specimen this size at this age, over a century into a climate its ancestors never evolved for, represents one of the country's oldest continuous experiments in whether an imported tree can actually thrive here. It stands close enough to Reykjavik's City Hall and the Tjörnin pond that most visitors to either landmark walk directly past it without knowing it predates both the current city hall building and, in an informal sense, the country's independence itself.