In August this tree covers itself in white flowers, weeks after every lime and chestnut in the city has finished.
Japanese Pagoda Tree
This tree flowers cream in August, when almost nothing else in a European city is doing anything at all, and that habit is most of the reason it was ever planted. This page maps every japanese pagoda tree on the site, 19 so far across 17 cities.
Despite the name it is Chinese rather than Japanese, brought into European gardens in the eighteenth century and set out in squares and courtyards where lunch happens outdoors. Vienna, Munich and the City of London each protect one. The oldest here is not European: the pagoda tree in the courtyard of Jogyesa in Seoul is put at 400 to 450 years, older than the temple hall beside it, and every Buddha's Birthday its crown disappears under thousands of paper lanterns. Kew's, planted in 1762, is one of the five veterans the garden's first curator nicknamed the Old Lions. Eleven cities so far, twelve trees.
Amsterdam
Barcelona
The Japanese pagoda tree is not from Japan.
Vienna
Photo: Thomas Ledl (CC BY-SA 3.0 AT)
Vienna's tree catalogue dates this one to 1860, and the Stadtpark did not open until August 1862.
Paris
Photo: Heidi Meudt (CC BY 4.0)
Some trees earn their place through size, this one through posture.
London
Photo: Deror avi (CC BY-SA 3.0)
John Smith, Kew Gardens' first curator, gave five of its oldest trees a nickname that stuck: the Old Lions, veterans that have outlasted every curator, director and fashion in planting since the ga...
This is the only Japanese pagoda tree in the City of London, on the City of London's own account of its gardens, and a City business paper's tour of Finsbury Circus says the same.
Brussels
A Japanese pagoda tree grows in the garden of a monastery that housed Cistercian nuns for nearly six hundred years.
Brussels files this tree under a name and a nationality that are both wrong.
Seoul
Every year on Buddha's Birthday, thousands of paper lanterns get strung through this tree's canopy until the entire crown disappears under a ceiling of color, and it is large enough to make that po...
Padua
These two trees were planted in 1861, when Padua was still Austrian.
Munich
Photo: Martinus KE (CC BY-SA 4.0)
This tree flowers in August, the quietest month of the year for almost anything else blooming in Munich, and does it well enough into old age that the city has singled it out for legal protection t...
Lyon
Gerland is one of Lyon's newer large parks by name, built out on former industrial and marshland south of the city centre and reworked repeatedly through the 20th century, so a tree old enough to c...
Budapest
By the time Franz Joseph became emperor, this tree had already outlived the reason anyone remembered planting it.
Warsaw
This tree stands in front of a park nobody is allowed to enter.
Maastricht
The cultivar is named after the man who first noticed this tree comes out the wrong colour.
Leipzig
Photo: Edlerin (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Despite the name, the Japanese pagoda tree is native to China, not Japan; it reached Europe through Japanese trade ports in the eighteenth century and kept the misnomer.
Granada
Sophora japonica flowers late enough in the year to be useful: most ornamental trees in Granada's gardens finish blooming well before the height of summer, but this species holds its show for July...
Bergamo
Local press calls this the most renowned of Seriate's seven registered monumental trees, and it is not a tree.
Bratislava
Slovakia's state register of protected trees keeps its reasoning short, and this one earned five separate lines: cultural, scientific, landscape, historical and aesthetic value, all cited when the...
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