Photo: Saggittarius A (CC BY-SA 4.0)
This oak was already growing in an American nursery when Milan was still deciding what to do with the site of one of its six historic gates.
Northern Red Oak
Brussels Environment's own walking route through the Parc d'Egmont gives up on describing its red oak and tells you to come back in autumn instead. This page maps every northern red oak on the site, 22 so far across 16 cities.
That is the whole reason a North American tree ended up on European streets: nothing native turns that colour. Five of the six mapped here are European plantings and only one is at home, growing on the Spicebush Trail in a 50 acre patch of old forest inside the New York Botanical Garden. Milan has two, one beside the site of one of the city's six historic gates and one on a horse racing track that stopped racing a century ago and became a school. Prague's stands on the island where the city's archers used to practise. The Baarn oak, roughly 175 years old, wears a ring carrying words the municipality asked its residents to write in 2021.
Milan
Photo: Carlo Dell'Orto (CC BY-SA 4.0)
This oak grows on a horse-racing track that stopped racing a century ago and became a school instead.
Prague
An American tree turns the best colour in central Prague, on an island where Bohemian archers used to practise.
Brussels
Brussels Environment's own walking route through this park gives up on describing this tree and simply says that in autumn you will notice it before you read the sign.
Krakow
Krakow's monumental trees are almost all native oaks and limes, which makes this one an outlier twice over: a Northern Red Oak, a North American species, growing in the garden of a public library.
Montreal
In 1954 Mayor Jean Drapeau had much of Mont-Royal's undergrowth cut away, in a campaign remembered afterwards as the morality cuts.
New York
This oak grows in the middle of the Spicebush Trail inside the Thain Family Forest, a 50 acre stretch of the New York Botanical Garden that has never been logged and represents the largest survivin...
Toronto
In 2020 Toronto's city council voted to buy a private house on Coral Gable Drive, not to live in it, but to tear it down and save the oak growing beside it.
Toronto has an official tree, and this is it.
The Long Branch Hotel burned down in 1958.
Munich
An American red oak thick enough to be one of Munich's largest hides behind a tennis club, a hundred metres north of the Fasanerie restaurant in Hartmannshofer Park, with no sign anywhere pointing...
Munich's protection order calls this tree rare, which is an odd thing to say about a red oak.
Quebec City
La Presse reported that the oldest tree on the Plains of Abraham is a red oak on Rue De Laune, reigning there for more than 250 years.
This oak stands fifteen metres from the tree the newspapers call the park's oldest, and nobody has put a number on its own years.
Grande Allee was planted with elms, and one of the largest trees on it is an oak.
Haarlem
Come in through the Kleverlaan gate and the first thing you meet is an avenue of wingnuts.
Tallinn
The house burned down in 1995.
Apeldoorn
This park exists to sell building plots.
Baarn
Planted around 1850 and now 5.52 metres around, the American oak of the Pekingtuin is the heaviest trunk in Baarn's village centre, and it stands five minutes from the railway station in a park tha...
Venlo
It is behind the animal paddock at a children's farm, which is the least dignified address of any tree on this page and probably the best one.
Zwolle
It was planted for one week a year and it delivers.
Sittard-Geleen
This Northern red oak grows by Geleen-Oost railway station, banded by the national register to a planting around 1870, roughly 160 years old.
Explore by city: Amsterdam · Rome · Milan · Lisbon · Barcelona · Singapore · Brisbane · Florence · Palermo · Madrid · Naples · Prague · Vienna · Seville · Paris · Copenhagen · Malaga · London · Bath · Venice · Brussels · Nijmegen · Valencia · Palma de Mallorca · Dublin · Fukuoka · Seoul · Bologna · Alicante · Porto · Krakow · The Hague · Montreal · Edinburgh · New York · Toronto · Groningen · Leiden · Geneva · Reykjavik · Tokyo · Dubrovnik · Cagliari · Cambridge · Padua · Sintra · Berlin · Washington DC · Trieste · Guimaraes · Kyoto · Munich · Vilnius · Utrecht · Oslo · Turin · Dresden · Boston · Sorrento · Bristol · Cordoba · Potsdam · Athens · Chicago · Lyon · Cork · Budapest · Buenos Aires · Quebec City · Helsinki · Warsaw · Caserta · Maastricht · Glasgow · Seattle · Haarlem · Tallinn · Lucca · Nice · Sydney · Zurich · Cadiz · York · Setubal · Istanbul · Verona · Delft · Arnhem · Catania · Braga · Los Angeles · Rotterdam · Hong Kong · Oahu · Bari · Genoa · Mexico City · Leipzig · Oxford · Brno · Poznan · Stockholm · New Orleans · Den Bosch · Bilbao · Split · Zaragoza · Ljubljana · Breda · Osaka · Belgrade · Sofia · Granada · Melbourne · Ferrara · Wroclaw · Bangkok · Bucharest · Thessaloniki · Parma · Gdansk · Antwerp · Alkmaar · Amersfoort · Apeldoorn · Baarn · Bucaco · Deventer · Dordrecht · Ede · Eindhoven · Emmen · Enschede · Helmond · Leeuwarden · Nara · Tilburg · Venlo · Zwolle · Aarhus · Assen · Austin · Bergamo · Bordeaux · Bratislava · Cologne · Como · Crete · Cyprus · Dallas · Frankfurt · Graz · Haarlemmermeer · Hawaii · Heerlen · Hilo · Hilversum · Hobart · Hoorn · Houston · Las Vegas · Madeira · Nuremberg · Oss · Ottawa · Perth · Perugia · Portland · Roosendaal · Sardinia · Sittard-Geleen · Strasbourg · Tenerife · Toulouse · Trento · Zaanstad · or browse all species.