A Japanese pagoda tree grows in the garden of a monastery that housed Cistercian nuns for nearly six hundred years.
Japanese Pagoda Tree
Styphnolobium japonicum
This tree flowers cream in August, when almost nothing else in a city is doing anything at all, and that habit is most of the reason it was ever planted. We map 26 of them, in 22 cities.
Despite the name it is Chinese rather than Japanese, where it is the scholar tree, and it reached European gardens in the eighteenth century. The oldest are in Asia. Beijing's Tang Scholar Tree in Beihai Park is traditionally dated to about 1,200 years, and the Qianlong Emperor built a pavilion so he could sit and look at it. In the courtyard of Jogyesa in Seoul, one put at 400 to 450 years disappears under thousands of paper lanterns every Buddha's Birthday. Kew's, planted in 1762, is one of the five veterans the garden's first curator nicknamed the Old Lions, and Hamburg's, six metres round, was named a German national heritage tree in 2026.
Brussels
Brussels files this tree under a name and a nationality that are both wrong.
Munich
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...
Photo: Martinus KE (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Barcelona
The Japanese pagoda tree is not from Japan.
Paris
Some trees earn their place through size, this one through posture.
Photo: Heidi Meudt (CC BY 4.0)
Seattle
When the Capitol Hill light rail station was being dug, this tree stood just inside the construction wall, and a local reporter wrote in 2015 that it was probably only still standing because it was...
Amsterdam
In August this tree covers itself in white flowers, weeks after every lime and chestnut in the city has finished.
Milan
Italy's national register of monumental trees rarely carries this species.
Leipzig
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.
Photo: Edlerin (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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...
London
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...
Photo: Deror avi (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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.
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...
Vienna
Vienna's tree catalogue dates this one to 1860, and the Stadtpark did not open until August 1862.
Photo: Thomas Ledl (CC BY-SA 3.0 AT)
Budapest
By the time Franz Joseph became emperor, this tree had already outlived the reason anyone remembered planting it.
Beijing
The Qianlong Emperor built a pavilion so he could sit and look at this tree, then named the courtyard after it: Guke Ting, the Court of the Ancient Bole.
A scholar tree's leaf usually runs to a dozen or more leaflets.
Three trees have stood on this exact spot, and none of them is the one everybody comes to see.
Photo: そらみみ (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Warsaw
This tree stands in front of a park nobody is allowed to enter.
Copenhagen
The Japanese pagoda tree is not Japanese.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Maastricht
The cultivar is named after the man who first noticed this tree comes out the wrong colour.
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.
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...
Hamburg
There is no stronger Japanese pagoda tree known anywhere in the world than this one, according to the city that owns the ground it stands on.
Photo: Tobibauer (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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