Autumn colour
An American tree turns the best colour in central Prague, on an island where Bohemian archers used to practise.
Northern Red Oak
Quercus rubra
Northern red oak is the oak of eastern North America, and Europe planted it for one thing: nothing native turns that colour in autumn. We map 33 of them, in 24 cities.
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. At home the old ones are older. In 2020 Toronto's city council bought a private house on Coral Gable Drive and tore it down to save Zhelevo, an oak of roughly 300 years left from the savannah along the old Carrying Place trail. Toronto's official tree, in Kew Gardens, is 5.3 metres round with one limb sagging to the grass. In Europe, Prague's stands on the island where the city's archers used to practise, and the Baarn oak, roughly 175 years old, wears a ring carrying words the municipality asked its residents to write in 2021.
Prague
Brussels
Autumn colour
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.
Munich
Autumn colour
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...
Autumn colour
Munich's protection order calls this tree rare, which is an odd thing to say about a red oak.
Seattle
Autumn colour
This oak is 55 feet wider than it is tall.
Milan
Autumn colour
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.
Photo: Saggittarius A (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Autumn colour
This oak grows on a horse-racing track that stopped racing a century ago and became a school instead.
Photo: Carlo Dell'Orto (CC BY-SA 4.0)
New York
Autumn colour
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...
Berlin
Autumn colour
Queen Elizabeth II planted this oak herself, on 27 May 1965, on her first visit to West Berlin.
Tallinn
The house burned down in 1995.
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.
Autumn colour
Toronto has an official tree, and this is it.
Autumn colour
The Long Branch Hotel burned down in 1958.
Montreal
Autumn colour
In 1954 Mayor Jean Drapeau had much of Mont-Royal's undergrowth cut away, in a campaign remembered afterwards as the morality cuts.
Autumn colour
When McGill University bought the top of Westmount hill in 1895 to keep it from being built on, this oak was already about thirty years old.
Krakow
Autumn colour
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.
Quebec City
Autumn colour
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.
Vancouver
Autumn colour
The city's heritage register carries one line about this tree: Northern Red Oak, 501 West 12th Avenue.
Copenhagen
Autumn colour
Most northern red oaks grow up.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Sapporo
Autumn colour
This tree was posted from Massachusetts.
Apeldoorn
Autumn colour
This park exists to sell building plots.
Haarlem
Autumn colour
Come in through the Kleverlaan gate and the first thing you meet is an avenue of wingnuts.
Venlo
Autumn colour
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
Autumn colour
It was planted for one week a year and it delivers.
Baarn
Autumn colour
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...
Ghent
Autumn colour
Wondelgem planted this oak in 1920 and put it between the church and the stone that lists its dead.
Ottawa
The register that protects this oak does not say when it was planted, and for once that gap is not an oversight: unlike the exotic and ornamental trees the Ottawa Improvement Commission planted alo...
Portland
Autumn colour
This oak's crown is wider than the tree is tall.
Autumn colour
Two northern red oaks stand on opposite sides of Powell Park, and their trunks are identical to the inch: 70 inches through, 18.3 feet round, about 5.58 metres.
Autumn colour
Portland's heritage register measured this oak's trunk at exactly the size of the one 120 metres south of it: 70 inches through, 18.3 feet round.
Sittard-Geleen
Autumn colour
This Northern red oak grows by Geleen-Oost railway station, banded by the national register to a planting around 1870, roughly 160 years old.
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