Queen Victoria's Sequoia 165 years
Phoenix Park. A California redwood has been growing on Irish presidential land since a queen put it there.
Giant Sequoia
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. This page maps every giant sequoia on the site, 14 so far across 13 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: in the Sierra Nevada they pass 3,000 years and eighty metres. The sequoias mapped so far are Europe's biggest infants, largest and oldest first.
Paris
The Sequoia of Buttes-Chaumont 150+ years
19th arrondissement. A Californian giant grows on a former gypsum quarry in working class Paris.
Dublin
Brussels
The Giant Sequoia of Parc de Woluwe 125-135 years
Woluwe-Saint-Pierre. The single largest tree in Brussels by trunk girth is not native to Europe at all.
Vienna
The Giant Sequoias of Pötzleinsdorfer Schlosspark estimated 80-150 years
Währing, 18th district. 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.
Berlin
The Giant Sequoia of the Tiergarten 135 years
Tiergarten, Mitte. A tree that can live 3,000 years in California has had 135 of them in central Berlin.
Cambridge
The Giant Redwood of the Botanic Garden 171 years
Newtown. 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 old and taller than anything in Britain.
Glasgow
Holmwood's Giant Redwoods around 100 years
Cathcart. 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 attention went to what was actually growing in its garden.
Cork
The Boole Library Redwoods approximately 150 years
University College Cork. The tallest trees on University College Cork's campus were paid for with beer.
Zurich
Alfred Escher's Giant Sequoia over 165 years
Enge. 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 for anything else.
The Mammutbaum of Hohlstrasse around 120 years
Altstetten. This giant sequoia predates the seven-storey bank building that now looms over it by decades, and it nearly lost that seniority battle anyway.
Geneva
The Sequoia Grove of Parc Barton 150-170 years
Pâquis. 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.
Maastricht
The Giant Sequoias of Tongerseweg about 150 years
Wyckerpoort. 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 California and almost never found in a 19th-century Dutch burial ground.
Nijmegen
The Giant Sequoia of Krayenhoffpark 100 years
Biezen. A Californian giant grows in one of Nijmegen's smallest parks, in a neighbourhood built for railway employees.
Breda
The Giant Sequoia of Laurenspark 140 years
Ginneken. 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 district in the south of town.
Explore by city: Amsterdam · Lisbon · London · Paris · Rome · Tokyo · Istanbul · Barcelona · Kyoto · Madrid · New York · Dublin · Edinburgh · Brussels · Antwerp · Vienna · Prague · Berlin · Seville · Porto · Athens · Florence · Milan · Venice · Munich · Nice · Lyon · Valencia · Malaga · Granada · Naples · Bologna · Verona · York · Bath · Oxford · Cambridge · Bristol · Glasgow · Cork · Budapest · Krakow · Copenhagen · Stockholm · Dubrovnik · Zurich · Oslo · Helsinki · Geneva · Warsaw · Utrecht · Rotterdam · The Hague · Haarlem · Groningen · Leiden · Maastricht · Nijmegen · Breda · Arnhem · Palermo · Thessaloniki · Gdansk · Ljubljana · Split · Belgrade · Bucharest · Sofia · Reykjavik · Singapore · Bangkok · Hong Kong · Seoul · Osaka · Cadiz · Sintra · or browse all species.