McGill's own alumni magazine once described this tree as peering in the windows of the Redpath Museum.
Black Walnut
Juglans nigra
Budapest's biggest black walnut is also its frailest, and both findings come out of the same survey. We map 12 of them, in 12 cities.
The city's parks company dated the tree on Margaret Island to around 213 years in 2020 and measured its trunk as the thickest black walnut there by a wide margin, with the runner-up 119 centimetres smaller around; a national database ranks it second in Hungary on girth. Portland's is what is left of a fourteen acre estate, a single walnut on a school lawn, and its own plaque and the city's field guide disagree about the planting date by roughly fifteen years. Split's is a curiosity for a different reason: Juglans nigra is an eastern North American forest tree, and the city's botanical survey grades it a rarity precisely because it has no business making a living this far down the Adriatic.
Montreal
Krakow
In fruit
Krakow's register of natural monuments holds exactly one black walnut, and this is it.
Budapest
In fruit
Budapest's biggest black walnut is also the frailest tree on this list, and both facts come from the same survey.
Warsaw
A black walnut, a species more at home on the eastern seaboard of North America, grows by a Polish palace named for a man who spent time in exile there.
Maastricht
Maastricht's Stadspark grew westward in 1886, absorbing the ground that became Monseigneur Nolenspark and Henri Hermanspark, under the design of Lievin Rosseels, son of the Leuven landscape archite...
Utrecht
This tree poisons the ground under it.
Split
In fruit
The black walnut growing in Đardin, Split's 19th-century public garden by the Golden Gate, is not a Mediterranean tree at all.
Arnhem
Every few years since 2006, whoever surveys Arnhem's monumental trees has come back to this black walnut and written down bad news: a conspicuous wound low on the trunk, a crown that had visibly th...
Deventer
This tree exists because of ice.
Gettysburg
There is concrete inside this walnut, poured into its trunk more than a century ago, and you can still see it through a crevice at the base.
Lausanne
Lausanne's own walking tour of its finest trees finishes at a tree from the wrong continent.
Portland
A fourteen-acre estate has been reduced to a single walnut on a school lawn.
Explore by city: Montreal · Krakow · Budapest · Warsaw · Maastricht · Utrecht · Arnhem · Deventer · Lausanne · Portland · every city · or browse all species.