Norway Spruce

Picea abies

Norway spruce belongs to the mountain forests of Scandinavia and central Europe, and on a Swedish fell it may hold the oldest living thing on this site. We map 7 of them, in 7 cities.

Old Tjikko, on Fulufjället, is a scrappy spruce about five metres tall whose visible trunk is only a few centuries old; the root system beneath it has been carbon-dated to about 9,550 years, sending up a new trunk each time the last one dies. Lithuania's Witch's Spruce breaks at knee height into eighteen stems that climb together to 32 metres, a habit specialists know of nowhere else in Europe. In cities it is always somebody's choice. Sofia's tallest was planted in 1885 by the writer Ivan Vazov and has outgrown the bust raised to him later, and Helsinki's Independence Spruce was sown on 6 December 1917, the day the Finnish Parliament accepted the declaration of independence.

Helsinki

The Independence Spruce

108 years · Kaivopuisto

This spruce is exactly as old as the country it stands in.

Reykjavik

The Spruce of Elliðaárhólmi

~60 years · Elliðaárdalur

The Norway spruce named Iceland's Tree of the Year in 2019 is not old by the standards of almost anywhere else on this site, an estimated 50 to 60 years at the time of its selection, but it stands...

Sofia

Ivan Vazov's Spruce

~140 years · Borisova Garden

Ivan Vazov, the author routinely called the Patriarch of Bulgarian Literature, planted a spruce in Borisova Garden in 1885, decades before Sofia's own cultural establishment got around to building...