The single largest tree in Brussels by trunk girth is not native to Europe at all.
Giant Sequoia
Sequoiadendron giganteum
The heaviest living things on earth reached Europe only in 1853, and the timing shaped everything: Victorian Britain was at peak plant mania, and a tree that could outweigh a blue whale sold itself. We map 56 of them, in 37 cities.
Nurserymen shipped seeds by the ton, aristocrats raced to plant avenues of them, and the British even named the species Wellingtonia after the recently dead duke, a name Californians never accepted. Every sequoia outside America is therefore young, barely 170 years at most, yet many already dominate their skylines, because the species grows fast and simply does not stop. At home in the Sierra Nevada it passes 3,000 years: the President is reckoned at about 3,200, the Grizzly Giant has lost four fifths of its bark to fire and is still alive, and General Sherman stands 83.6 metres tall.
Brussels
Cambridge
In 1852, the Cornish plant collector William Lobb reached Calaveras Grove in California and became one of the first Europeans to see Giant Redwoods growing wild, trees already thousands of years ol...
Berlin
A tree that can live 3,000 years in California has had 135 of them in central Berlin.
Photo: Miriam Guterland (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Seattle
The only measurements ever published about this sequoia are not measurements of this sequoia.
Paris
Europe had barely met this species when the tree went into the ground.
A Californian giant grows on a former gypsum quarry in working class Paris.
Photo: Heidi Meudt (Stitchbird2) (CC BY 4.0)
Vienna
Every giant sequoia growing in Europe today is, at most, about 170 years old, because the species was not seen by Europeans until 1852 and not exported until 1853.
Photo: ZavosBrachides (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Dublin
A California redwood has been growing on Irish presidential land since a queen put it there.
Edinburgh
A ring of Californian redwoods grows in Edinburgh, named for the Scot who helped save the Californian ones.
Geneva
About thirty giant sequoias grow in one Geneva park because a British diplomat's family fell for a California fashion, and because his daughter later made sure nobody could ever cut them down.
Glasgow
Alexander 'Greek' Thomson's Holmwood is famous for its architecture, a villa modelled so closely on classical Greek temples that its own guidebooks call it his masterpiece, and for years little att...
Eindhoven
In 1912 Anton Philips bought a farm on the heath and immediately started collecting conifers.
Maastricht
Some of the honour squares in Maastricht's oldest surviving cemetery were planted not with the usual yews or cypresses but with giant sequoias, a species native to a single mountain range in Califo...
Nijmegen
A Californian giant grows in one of Nijmegen's smallest parks, in a neighbourhood built for railway employees.
Salamanca
This tree could outlive the cathedral it faces.
Hobart
There are two of them, they went in together in 1879, and they still mark the entrance drive of the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens.
Zurich
Alfred Escher built modern Switzerland's railway network, founded the bank that became Credit Suisse and the institution now known as ETH Zurich, and by most accounts had almost no time left over f...
This giant sequoia predates the seven-storey bank building that now looms over it by decades, and it nearly lost that seniority battle anyway.
Cork
The tallest trees on University College Cork's campus were paid for with beer.
Breda
Despite its name, Ulvenhoutselaan runs inside Breda, not the separate village of Ulvenhout the street is named after, and this giant sequoia stands well within city limits along it, in the Ginneken...
Salzburg
The best measurement anyone has of this tree was taken by a geocacher with a tape measure in December 2019: just under six metres around the base.
Venlo
Planted on a field named after jousting, which is a collision of two ideas about display separated by five centuries.
The second of the three sequoias at Steyl, and the one standing in the monastery park itself.
The street is named after the tree.
Arnhem
The hunting lodge these two sequoias were planted for has vanished without trace.
Segovia
Lightning hit it in 1991 and it is still here and still growing.
The second-tallest sequoia in these gardens stands over a fountain about Perseus killing a sea monster.
Enschede
Somebody wrote down what this tree cost.
The farm this tree stands on was first written down in 1536.
Pamplona
There is a Californian redwood in the middle of Pamplona and it belongs to the government.
Baarn
The tallest thing in this village park is a Californian.
Ede
A tree from the Sierra Nevada, planted in a Gelderland village in the 1880s, now standing next to a fire station.
Sequoia National Park
The oldest known living giant sequoia stands on a trail loop a short walk from General Sherman.
In September 2021, with the KNP Complex Fire burning into the Giant Forest, park staff wrapped the base of this tree in aluminium foil.
Photo: Eric Kilby from Somerville, MA, USA (CC BY-SA 2.0)
This tree is named for the man who gave the Cherokee a written language.
Photo: Marty Aligata (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Depending on who held the tape, this tree holds 44,471 cubic feet of wood or 51,000.
Photo: Marty Aligata (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The eighth largest giant sequoia in the world went unrecognised until the 1950s, and the likely reason was the neighbour.
Until 2005 this was the second largest tree known on Earth.
The Sentinel Tree has moved up the rankings by standing still.
Stratfield Saye
Only four years after the giant sequoia reached Britain from California, one of the country's first plantings went into the ground at the Duke of Wellington's own estate.
Boise
In June 2017 a hospital paid around $300,000 to move a tree a quarter of a mile.
Bordeaux
A Californian giant sequoia with a trunk close to six metres round stands in what used to be a Bordeaux wine estate.
Freiburg
A boy named Klaus Doelle used to press small treasures into the soft bark of this sequoia and seal them back up, sure nobody would ever find them.
Kings Canyon National Park
Around 8,000 giant sequoias were cut down in Converse Basin between 1897 and 1907, in what had been the largest sequoia grove in the world.
This is the only living thing the United States has declared a national shrine.
Photo: Marty Aligata (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The eleventh largest tree on earth, or the tenth, depending on whose list you read, stands a few minutes from the General Grant.
Lausanne
This sequoia was already worth writing about in 1912, when Henri Badoux catalogued the notable trees of the canton and put it in the book.
Luxembourg City
Until February this year there were two.
Portland
Forty-five metres of Californian giant sequoia is growing out of a street verge in the Southwest Hills, and nobody has written down when it was planted.
Forty two metres, on a trunk 7.8 metres round, standing beside a reservoir on the side of an extinct volcano.
Senonches
Seven giant sequoias ring a single road junction in a French forest of oak and beech.
Yosemite National Park
More than four fifths of this tree's bark and sapwood has burned away over the centuries, and it is still alive.
Photo: Dietmar Rabich (CC BY-SA 4.0)
This is the last giant sequoia tunnel tree still standing anywhere.
Photo: Steveshelokhonov (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Two giant sequoias grew up so close together that their trunks fused at the base, and they have gone on as one.
Nobody cut the hole in this tree.
Four giant sequoias stand here with their roots so intertwined that if one of the Three Graces falls, it will probably take the others down with it.
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