What is the oldest tree in Reykjavik?
Reykjavik's oldest tree, and the oldest planted tree in all of Iceland, is a Swedish whitebeam in Víkurgarður (also called Fógetagarður), planted in 1884 by health director Georg Schierbeck on the site of the city's former churchyard. It stands at the corner of Aðalstræti and Kirkjustræti and is roughly 142 years old.
The whitebeam's claim is unusually solid for a country where almost no tree can point to a documented planting year at all. Georg Schierbeck, Iceland's Danish-born director of health, took over the site of Reykjavik's disused churchyard in 1883 specifically to run horticultural trials, testing which imported species could survive the climate, and his own records place the whitebeam's planting in the summer of 1884. Most of what he planted alongside it did not survive; a bay willow from the same year and site, once the parent of nearly every bay willow in Iceland, blew down in a 1987 storm and is gone. The whitebeam is the exception, cared for continuously by the magistrate's family who took over the garden after Schierbeck left for Denmark in 1894, through a 1972 redesign, and into the present, where it still stands at the same street corner. Nothing else in Reykjavik, or in Iceland more broadly, has a comparably documented claim to being older as a deliberately planted, still-living specimen, which is why this one tree carries the title at both the city and national level simultaneously.
One of Reykjavik's trees also appears in The Autumn Harvest, a themed collection spanning several cities.