In fruit
This cedar has spent its life pretending to be a broadleaf.
Cedar of Lebanon
Cedrus libani
This is the only tree on a national flag, and the only one whose timber built both Solomon's temple and the ships of the Phoenicians, at least according to the sources those builders left behind. We map 40 of them, in 29 cities.
When seeds reached Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries the Cedar of Lebanon became the ultimate estate status symbol: an aristocrat planted one knowing only his grandchildren would see the famous silhouette, the enormous level layers of dark foliage held out flat as trays. That slow flat-topped shape is the tree's signature and takes a century to appear, so every convincing cedar crown you see is old almost by definition. The cedars mapped so far stand in parks and former estates, oldest first.
Brussels
Rotterdam
In fruit
Rotterdam's own garden site and Wikipedia both single out this pair as the best-known trees in the whole of Schoonoord, and neither source agrees on how old they are.
New York
In fruit
Central Park's own Conservancy calls this a single cedar of Lebanon.
Geneva
In fruit
A French naturalist smuggled cedar seeds out of a garden in England, sowed them at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, and a handful of the resulting saplings ended up gifted to a Genevan baron in 1735.
Photo: Rama (CC BY-SA 2.0 FR)
In fruit
This cedar's age was worked out by measuring a different cedar.
In fruit
This cedar is a direct descendant of the Beaulieu cedars across town, grown from their seed once the Lullin family decided their own lakeside estate needed the same fashionable tree everyone else w...
Photo: MHM55 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
In fruit
A mayor planted this cedar in the summer of 1820 because his son had just been born.
Venice
The Bcharre Cedars of San Lazzaro degli ArmeniRecent planting, ancient provenance
In fruit
These three cedars did not grow up on this island, they were carried to it.
Edinburgh
In fruit
This cedar has a birth certificate few trees in Scotland can match: 1826, recorded by the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh's own staff as one of the first trees they planted after the garden moved to...
Lyon
In fruit
The square's namesake hid people from the Gestapo two streets from here.
Paris
In fruit
Legend says this cedar crossed the Channel in a hat.
Leeuwarden
In fruit
A cedar from the mountains of Lebanon has stood in front of a Frisian almshouse since the year the almshouse was finished.
Rome
In fruit
Sources disagree by a century and a half on how old this cedar is, and the disagreement is the most honest thing anyone can say about it.
Photo: Albarubescens (CC BY-SA 4.0)
In fruit
No cedar on Rome's monumental register is thicker than this one.
Photo: Byus71 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
In fruit
Rome's own list of monumental trees does not describe this cedar on its own.
Photo: Albarubescens (CC BY-SA 4.0)
In fruit
This cedar shares its hillside with the dead of a revolution.
In fruit
A few meters from Villa Celimontana's Aleppo pine grows its opposite in almost every way: straight where the pine leans, dense and dark where the pine is sparse, native to a mountain range a thousa...
Photo: Beatrice (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Verona
In fruit
This cedar has stood beside the Roman Arena for longer than most of the buildings currently ringing the square around it.
Photo: Claconvr (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Madrid
In fruit
Nobody agrees how old this cedar is, and the gap is a century.
Photo: EnriqueSN (CC BY-SA 4.0)
In fruit
At 33 metres this is the tallest tree on the Retiro's catalogued list, and it does not look it, because it stands at a junction of wide avenues where nothing nearby gives the eye anything to measur...
Photo: Garuskas (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Florence
In fruit
Most of Florence's grand hillside gardens exist because the city briefly ran the whole of Italy.
Eindhoven
In fruit
Eindhoven's own tree database contradicts itself about this tree.
Naples
In fruit
A monumental plane on this same staircase was destroyed by a storm in 2022.
Bristol
In fruit
John Scandrett Harford, a wealthy Bristol banker, bought Blaise Castle Estate in 1789 and hired the two biggest names in English landscape design of the era, Humphry Repton and later John Nash, to...
Parma
In fruit
Piazzale della Pace did not exist as a square until after the Second World War, laid out over ground reshaped by the bombing that damaged much of central Parma.
Genoa
In fruit
Two trees from opposite ends of the old trading world stand together at this lake: an East Asian camphor and this Cedar of Lebanon, and the Ministry of Culture names both in its description of the...
In fruit
Genoa's monumental tree register does not give ages, only measurements, so this cedar of Lebanon comes with a girth, four metres sixty one round, and nothing else: no planting date, no story attach...
Dubrovnik
In fruit
Planted in 1871, this cedar is the youngest of the eight trees Trsteno's own dendrological survey names as the arboretum's oldest documented specimens, and even at roughly 155 years old it already...
Lucca
In fruit
This tree is two years younger than the garden around it.
Photo: Palickap (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Segovia
In fruit
The cedar of Lebanon is the oldest fashion in this garden.
Caserta
In fruit
Seven and three quarter metres around the trunk, and sixteen metres tall.
Brighton
In fruit
Three cedars of Lebanon stand behind Stanmer House, and one of them is the tallest of its species in East Sussex on the council's own reckoning.
Como
In fruit
Lombardy held a public vote for its tree of the year in 2024, and this cedar won it.
Photo: Daniela Manili Pessina (CC BY-SA 4.0)
In fruit
Six metres of trunk, standing directly in front of the house, in a park that grows a botanical collection dedicated to Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist Como claims as its own.
Lausanne
In fruit
Seven and a half metres round, and only eighteen metres tall.
Perugia
In fruit
A cedar of Lebanon this thick should be twice as tall.
In fruit
The national register knows how tall this cedar is and not how wide.
Roosendaal
The national monument listing for Villa Van Gilse names the oaks, a chestnut and a red beech from the years the house was built.
Salt Lake City
Temple Square's famous cedar is said to have arrived around 1949 in a suitcase, seven inches tall.
Sardinia
In fruit
A Sardinian marquis with a botany habit is said to have planted this cedar in 1835, when it was already six years old, as one of the first Cedars of Lebanon brought into Europe.
Photo: Isabetta70 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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