The Whitebeam of Víkurgarður

Reykjavik's oldest tree stands on ground that was the city's main burial ground for roughly six centuries, from a church first recorded around 1200 until the last graves stopped in 1839. In 1883 the Danish health director Georg Schierbeck took over the disused churchyard for horticultural experiments, planting vegetables, grain, shrubs and trees to test what could actually grow in Iceland's climate, and the following summer he put a Swedish whitebeam in the ground at the corner of Aðalstræti and Kirkjustræti. It survived when almost everything else in his experimental garden did not, and at around 142 years old it now holds the title of the oldest planted tree in the country, not just the city, a distinction that says as much about Iceland's near-total historical deforestation as it does about the tree itself. Schierbeck left for Denmark a decade later, and the site passed to a local magistrate's family who kept tending it, which is most of why anything from his original planting survived at all. The whitebeam has outlasted the churchyard's headstones, the garden's original purpose, and a 1972 redesign that turned the space into more of a square than a garden, one of only a few of Schierbeck's original trees still standing.