Amsterdam's oldest tree spent its first ninety years alone.
Pedunculate Oak
Foresters used to say an oak spends three hundred years growing, three hundred resting, and three hundred slowly dying. This page maps every pedunculate oak on the site, 160 so far across 84 cities.
The pedunculate oak, Quercus robur, is the tree that adage was built on: the classic broad English oak of parkland and legend, though it grows just as happily in Amsterdam or Berlin. Its trick for extreme age is to hollow out. As the heartwood rots away the tree keeps only its living outer sleeve, which lightens the load and can extend its life past a thousand years. That is why the oldest oaks are the fattest and most gnarled, not the tallest. Kings prized them enough to wall entire parks around them, and their timber built the navies and cathedrals of northern Europe. These are the ancient oaks mapped on the site so far, oldest first.
Amsterdam
Florence
The tallest tree in Florence's largest park stands where racehorses used to run.
Vienna
In September 1941 three trees in one corner of Schönbrunn's botanical garden were put under protection.
Photo: Clemens Mosch (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Its crown alone covers more ground than most Viennese apartment buildings.
Vienna protects this oak as a natural monument and has published almost nothing else about it.
London
Photo: AndyScott (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The wall came second: this oak was already centuries old when Charles I enclosed Richmond Park around it in 1637, walling off common land for his own deer rather than planting anything new.
Prague
Photo: Sefjo (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Prague's very first legally protected oak grows on an island that used to flood every spring until imperial engineers tamed it.
Photo: The photonaut (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The Old Town has exactly one legally protected oak and it grows on a corner nobody photographs.
Photo: Matej Batha (CC BY-SA 2.5)
The street on the far side of this oak is called V Botanice, In the Botanical Garden, and there is no botanical garden.
Copenhagen
Photo: Niels Orbesen (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Ten metres and 42 centimetres around, and empty in the middle.
Denmark protected this oak by law in 1956 and still cannot date it within four centuries.
This oak was dying, and treasure hunters saved it by accident.
This oak has no recorded birthday, but the garden gives it a ceiling.
Dublin
An avenue of oaks in Corkagh Park once led somewhere: to a country house that no longer exists.
Brussels
Brussels' own heritage inventory calls this oak probably the oldest tree of any kind in the entire region, and its evidence is a single number: 6.05 metres around the trunk, measured at chest height.
Photo: GdML (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Brussels' most fashionable park is also a fragment of a forest older than the city walls that once surrounded it.
The Mont des Arts garden is not what it looks like: a formal, two-hectare terrace of clipped yew and box hedges offering one of the best panoramic views over central Brussels, it is actually a roof...
Toronto
On 12 May 1937, while George VI was being crowned in London, Toronto put an oak in the ground on the lakeshore and planted about 150 more trees around it before the day was out.
Krakow
Photo: Janusz Krzyzek (CC BY-SA 4.0)
This oak is named after the man who spent decades making sure it did not get cut down, not after anyone who planted it.
Photo: Jerzy Opiola (CC BY-SA 4.0)
For generations, guides at Poland's oldest botanical garden told visitors this oak was 500 years old, older than the university faculty that planted the garden around it.
Two protected trees stand two doors apart on ul.
Plac Sikorskiego's oak is the youngest addition to Krakow's register among the trees on this page, protected in 2007 rather than in the 1997 batch that covers most of the others.
This is one of the newest names on Krakow's monument register, a list whose earliest entries reach back to the 1960s.
Munich
Photo: Tkarcher (CC BY-SA 4.0)
This oak has outlasted the village it once stood outside, the Bavarian duchy that once ruled the land, and most of its own major branches.
Photo: Peterf (CC BY-SA 4.0)
This oak grows in the one part of a royal palace garden built to look like it wasn't designed at all.
Photo: Rufus46 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Twelve thousand schoolchildren planted this oak in one afternoon, or at least watched a handful of their classmates do it.
Maria-Eich-Strasse means Mary's Oak Street, and this is not that oak.
Berlin
Photo: Maculata (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Berlin's oldest tree is older than the city itself.
Photo: Fridolin freudenfett (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The thickest trunk in Berlin does not belong to the city's oldest tree.
Grunewald's oldest tree survived storms that took its own crown apart.
Photo: Dirk Ingo Franke (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Someone tried to kill this oak as a political protest, and Berlin planted a replacement within weeks.
Utrecht
An oak became a protest symbol and then won.
The Hague
William of Orange personally guaranteed this oak's forest would survive forever, four and a half centuries before anyone thought to count the tree's actual rings.
Four minutes north of the platforms at Den Haag Centraal, on the old deer meadow called the Koekamp, stands an oak the national register dates to somewhere between 1750 and 1800.
Someone wrote a book length poem about this estate a century and a half before the oak was planted.
This oak is roughly a century and a half older than every building around it.
Hendrik Willem Mesdag painted the largest painting in the Netherlands, and this oak was already forty or fifty years old when he did it.
This oak was planted in a burial ground that had already been in use for a century and a half.
A hollow in this oak's trunk has been furnished like a dollhouse for as long as anyone in the neighbourhood can remember, complete with tiny notes left for gnomes nobody has ever claimed to see.
Groningen
Storm Henk answered a question nobody had thought to ask properly.
For decades in the twentieth century, Groningen parked cars on top of this oak's roots.
Vilnius
This oak lost roughly eighty percent of its root system and is still alive.
The tree commemorates a walk.
Eindhoven
For a hundred years you could not come here.
In 1920 Anton Philips and his wife Anna de Jongh gave twenty five hectares of wood to the people of Eindhoven.
Every December the neighbourhood covers this oak in fairy lights, and keeps them on through January.
Arnhem
Most oak stories are about longevity.
Geneva
The city has drawn a quiet zone around this oak to keep visitors' feet off its roots.
Budapest
This oak is older than the park it stands in.
Warsaw
Warsaw's oldest tree survived six centuries of Polish history only to be set on fire by a person, not a storm, in June 2019.
For almost two centuries, two pedunculate oaks have grown side by side in the Romantic Garden of Lazienki Krolewskie, the park Poland's last king built for himself in the 18th century.
Five pedunculate oaks stand together near Palac Szustra, the neoclassical villa at the heart of Park Morskie Oko, registered as one natural monument in 1978.
An oak stands on Aleja Niepodleglosci, on the edge of what was once the main campus of SGGW, the Warsaw University of Life Sciences.
Warsaw's register of natural monuments gives this oak a first name.
Warsaw's register gives this oak a date five years older than its five famous neighbours.
Maastricht
A baron's coat of arms is the reason this forest has straight lines running through it at all.
Lyon
Villeurbanne's official tree register calls this pedunculate oak rare, and it means it plainly: street plantings here run to plane and lime, so a full-grown Quercus robur on a residential corner st...
Bristol
Ashton Court appears in the Domesday Book, the survey William the Conqueror ordered of his new kingdom in 1086, and one oak in the estate's parkland is thought to have already been growing around t...
Sir John Vanbrugh, the architect behind Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard, designed Kings Weston House for the politician Edward Southwell between 1712 and 1719, one of the grandest early 18th-cent...
Guimaraes
Nobody has put a number on this oak, and the official one is no help.
Oslo
Oslo's own city-planning office names this oak the city's oldest tree, roughly 500 to 600 years old with a trunk about eight metres around, growing in the Montebello area on the city's west side.
Potsdam
The oak was here first.
Berlin protects this oak by law and almost nothing else about it is on record.
Braga
Three oaks, one entry.
Helsinki
Finland's second-thickest oak grows behind a golf clubhouse, which is either an odd place for a national record or exactly where you would expect one, since golf courses are where old estate trees...
A Swedish king is said to have knelt in the mud here and planted an acorn himself.
Pamplona
This is the tree people in Navarra mean when they say the big oak.
Lightning took one of its main limbs and it is still standing.
Two of them, declared separately, about 570 metres apart in the same wood.
Turin
Photo: Ivan Ruggiero (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Every other tree in Turin that the register dates past two hundred years is a plane.
Brno
The law draws a circle round this oak.
Brno put a price on this oak before it protected it: more than 600,000 Kčs, the figure on record when the city's national committee declared it a memorial tree on 27 June 1985, alongside two other...
Leipzig
Photo: Edlerin (CC BY-SA 3.0)
A pedunculate oak on Kaethe-Kollwitz-Strasse, named for the Leipzig-connected printmaker and sculptor, carries Leipzig's Naturdenkmal protection under the same 1996 resolution as six other trees on...
Poznan
Poznan's oldest protected tree on this page stands inside a playground fence, which is not where you would expect to find a tree the city dates to as much as three centuries old.
This oak split itself into a small crowd.
Cytadela Park sits on the ruins of a Prussian fortress that became, in February 1945, one of the last and bloodiest German strongholds of the war on this front.
Tilburg
The youngest tree on this page and the one that will outlast every other by centuries.
Amersfoort
Everything at this crossroads has been replaced except the tree.
Den Bosch
The earthwork under this oak is younger than the oak.
Helmond
Somebody wrote a book about the trees of this town, and because of it we know what this oak is called.
The tower dates from about 1400 and the oak from about 1855, which is a gap of four and a half centuries between two things standing side by side.
The oldest of the four survivors in the castle grounds, and the one most likely to outlast the rest by centuries.
Genoa
The park's own notes point out that a pedunculate oak can live five hundred years, which makes this one, at somewhere around 120 to 170, a tree with most of its life still in front of it.
Apeldoorn
William III wanted somewhere to hunt, and in 1685 he built a palace on the sand north of a village nobody had heard of.
An oak the size and thickness of trees three times its age stands in the enriched soil of what used to be a rose garden.
Haarlem
Two pedunculate oaks stand together on the west side of the Frederikspark, and on the register's own dating they are the oldest things in it.
The Wijngaardtuin, the vineyard garden, takes its name from a monastery vineyard planted here in the sixteenth century, land that stayed under religious cultivation for generations before the city...
Stockholm
Stockholm's founding date is usually given as 1252, when the regent Birger Jarl is credited with establishing the city, and this oak has been growing on Kungsholmen for almost exactly as long, roug...
Photo: Holger.Ellgaard (CC BY-SA 3.0)
In 1835, the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell was in Stockholm gathering evidence for one of the founding ideas of modern geology, that Scandinavia's land was slowly rising out of the sea, a proces...
Photo: Holger.Ellgaard (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Sweden once made cutting down an oak a capital offense, because the navy needed every mature oak trunk for warship hulls and the crown claimed ownership of the species outright, a protection that s...
Vancouver
Vancouver's heritage register lists this oak the way it lists buildings, and two accounts explain how it got there.
Parma
This oak, 4.20 metres round and 25 metres tall, stands at the western edge of the grounds around Palazzo Ducale, the summer palace Duke Ottavio Farnese began in 1561 and the building that gives the...
Gdansk
Photo: Fry72 (Karel Frydrýšek), CC BY-SA 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
In 1685 the estate around this oak became the property of Jan III Sobieski, the king who had broken the Ottoman siege of Vienna two years earlier.
Photo: Zbigniew Zielinski (Drumeros) (CC BY 3.0)
At the foot of a hill named for a dead queen's role in defeating Napoleon grows Lostowice's oldest documented tree.
Salzburg
No tree in Salzburg has been protected for longer than this one.
On 15 September 1817 a man stopped and rested under this oak, and Salzburg has been naming the tree after him ever since.
Sofia
When the Slaveykov family moved from Plovdiv to Sofia after Bulgaria's 1878 liberation and bought a garden in what is now the Lozenets district, they got more than a plot of land.
Zwolle
It is in the new section, and it is a century and a half old, which tells you something about the scale a cemetery is planned on.
Cesky Krumlov
The crash barrier runs in front of it.
Wroclaw
Wroclaw's oldest tree is called Grandpa and it is held together with steel.
In 1865 the mayor of Breslau bought a piece of riverbank so that this oak would not be cut down.
Photo: Siliesiac (CC BY-SA 3.0)
This is the one in the group that is not falling apart.
Lightning found this oak and it is still in leaf.
Belgrade
Photo: BuhaM, CC BY-SA 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Belgrade's oldest protected natural monument stands on a market square, not in a forest or a palace garden.
Deventer
The register is honest about this one in a way that is worth quoting: the planting history is not known, and the oak was probably put in during the first half of the nineteenth century.
The French cut down the trees here and the city planted them again.
Enschede
The oldest tree in Enschede is not on anybody's estate.
Auckland
The two records of this oak cannot agree on the day it was planted, and they are a week apart.
A primary school in Takapuna is on Auckland Council's historic heritage schedule because of two oak trees on its front lawn.
Dresden
This oak is named after its wounds.
Bamberg
Photo: Stephan van Helden (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The address is the Devil's Ditch.
Bucaco
Almost everything classified in this forest arrived by ship.
Ede
There are two oaks here of the same age and they are worth seeing together, because between them they show what open ground does to a tree.
A single oak standing alone in a field is one of the most reliable pleasures this country offers, and it is almost always deliberate.
It stands inside a fenced national park where you have to pay to walk, and both of those facts are the reason it is in good condition.
A village street with an oak on it that is older than most of the houses.
Emmen
The register calls this one the tijgereik, the tiger oak, which is a nickname earned by geography rather than by anything about the tree.
There is only one long grave in the Netherlands and this oak is standing next to it.
This village was made by digging peat, and the oak is about as old as the village.
The oak is standing in the middle of the tomb.
Jægerspris Nordskov
Three ancient oaks made this forest famous.
Stelmužė
Photo: Algimantas Navickas, Arnoldas Abramavičius, Gintautas Antanavičius, Arvydas Veik (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Restorers working on the trunk found a rifle and a human skeleton inside it, thought to belong to a French soldier left behind by Napoleon's retreat from Russia in 1812.
Aarhus
Danish protection orders normally cover coastlines, moors and the ground around churches.
Danish women voted for the first time in 1915.
Assen
A fungus usually taken as a sign a tree is dying has been working through this oak's heartwood for decades, and it is still standing.
The register calls this the heaviest oak in Assen and one of the thickest in the whole of Drenthe, then adds the honest complaint: almost nobody has heard of it, next to the famous oaks of Beilen a...
Assen's old deer park still has its stable in it, built in 1875, and this oak grows right by it at the pond, planted, most likely, when the park itself was laid out in 1841.
Two stone gateposts stand next to this oak with nothing left between them to mark: they are what remains of the driveway to Port Natal, a psychiatric hospital built here in 1920 and replaced in 199...
This oak's girth runs past four metres, and it is in better shape than most trees this old get to be: a sound trunk, a clear run for its crown, and a growing spot nobody has ever crowded.
Bad Staffelstein
The 2003 feature film Luther put its young monk under this oak to shelter from a thunderstorm.
Boetersheim
This oak once caught fire and smouldered for weeks.
Bruges
Den Olifant is ten metres tall and may have passed 250 years, and those two facts are the same fact.
Cologne
A hundred metres from the big plane in the Hohenlind hospital park stands a pedunculate oak, 3.75 metres round, on the same patch of former estate ground that predates the hospital by the better pa...
Giessen
A steel grating covers the triangular hole in this oak's trunk, one heavy horizontal branch rests on two steel tubes, and the bark has gone from the far side.
Gothenburg
A crash barrier was growing into the trunk of Gothenburg's largest oak.
Goteborgs-Posten calls this the only giant tree in Gothenburg with a plot of its own, and it means that literally: Skar 751:93 is a parcel of land that exists for an oak rather than for a building.
When Gothenburg turned four oaks into nature monuments on 14 October 2025, this is the tree everybody stood under.
This oak was a property line before Laboratoriegatan was a street.
Graz
Photo: Gerdsch (CC BY-SA 3.0 at)
Three of Graz's officially protected trees stand inside one small park, and this oak is the first of them, rooted near the Muhlgasse side of the Volksgarten.
Two pedunculate oaks stand forty metres apart on the same hillside street, protected on the exact same day in July 1979, and this is the smaller of the pair: a trunk measured at 2.80 metres round i...
This oak and its neighbour forty metres down the hill were protected on the same day in July 1979, near-identical paperwork for two trees that turned out nothing alike: a 2015 field survey measured...
Hamburg
Hamburg's thickest oak has a hole in it big enough to stand in.
A birch is growing inside this oak, and has been for decades.
Heerlen
This oak grows in woodland that a nature conservation body now manages, on the north edge of ground once part of Imstenrade, one of the country estates that ring Heerlen's old core.
A second oak from the same wider stretch of woodland as its neighbour at Imstenrade, this one growing at the edge of the trees on the north side of Nieuw Eyckholt.
Hobart
This oak is not on Hobart's significant tree register for being large or old.
Kaunas
The oldest and thickest tree in Kaunas inherited the job from one that was burned down.
Luxembourg City
Luxembourg's register offers half a dozen grounds for protecting a tree, and this oak was listed on exactly one of them: its shape.
Somebody planted this oak for a botanist and then forgot to write down when.
Modena
Lightning took a large part of this oak's crown and it is still standing, held together with steel and visited by climbing arborists.
Riga
Somebody set fire to the inside of this oak three times in 1967.
Riga has spent decades patching this oak with metal sheets and plates, and it is still green.
The easiest old tree to reach in Riga is also the one nobody has named.
Rouen
This oak's story exists in exactly one place, and it is bolted to a post beside the trunk.
Sittard-Geleen
This oak on the Rijksweg Noord in Geleen carries the register's most detailed physical description on this list: a trunk running four and a half metres around, grown wide and open since it has stoo...
Stuttgart
Stuttgart's protection ordinance obliges the city to have this oak examined once a year for its health and safety.
Toulouse
Two entirely separate sets of people decided this oak was worth pointing at.
Trainiškis
This is the youngest tree on this list and genetically it is one of the oldest.
Untermerzbach
Two sources disagree about this oak's age by nearly three centuries, and neither has given way.
Volkenroda
Lightning did this oak an odd favour.
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