In fruit
Prague's own conservation register cannot decide what this tree is.
Photo: Aktron (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Sessile Oak
Quercus petraea
Sessile oak, Quercus petraea, is the pedunculate oak's straighter-trunked cousin: its acorns sit directly on the twig with no stalk, while its leaves carry the longer stalk the other species' acorns lack. We map 30 of them, in 19 cities.
In the Netherlands it is a genuine rarity, over 95 percent of the country's oaks are pedunculate, which is what made a single tree in Groningen's Zuiderplantsoen worth a public campaign when the city nearly felled it for a footpath in 2025. Germany's royal gardens kept better company: on Pfaueninsel, the private island a Prussian king filled with peacocks and follies, sessile oaks were already a century old when the landscaping began in 1793, and three still stand there, one carrying a door cut clean through its trunk since some forgotten fit of eighteenth century theatre. These are the sessile oaks mapped on the site so far.
Prague
Sorrento
The streets here are named after the dirt.
Berlin
Pfaueninsel's oaks were already old when the island became a royal garden.
Somebody built a working door into this oak's trunk, and it is still there.
The most precise thing known about this oak comes from a stranger's holiday photo.
Photo: S.Makhin, CC BY 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)
The only tree standing anywhere on the Olympiastadion's 810 by 320 metre grounds carries the name of a Prussian cavalry general.
Photo: Fridolin freudenfett (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Berlin's natural monument register lists more than six hundred trees, and only two of them are protected for four reasons at once.
Groningen
In the summer of 2025, a paving contractor's permit nearly ended this tree's life over a wheelchair-accessible path.
Vienna
In fruit
This sessile oak stands on Belvedereallee, a quieter stretch of the Prater than the chestnut-lined Hauptallee that gets all the postcards, in what is left of the floodplain forest that covered this...
Photo: GuentherZ (CC BY-SA 3.0 at)
Girona
Thirty-eight and a half metres is an extraordinary height for a sessile oak anywhere, and this one is doing it in Catalonia.
Tilburg
In fruit
In 1923 they took the church off this square.
Arnhem
Sonsbeek Park's oaks get most of Arnhem's attention, but a fifteen minute walk closer to the station, in the smaller Musispark behind Musis Sacrum, a sessile oak has been standing since roughly the...
Enschede
A dual carriageway runs through this park, and the tree is by a filling station.
Ede
This is not a trunk.
Achnacarry
Until 2009 the foresters working this plantation did not know the oak was there.
Dunkeld
Local tradition says the most celebrated Scottish fiddler of the 18th century wrote his tunes sitting under this oak, and that the Duke of Atholl could hear him across the Tay.
Giessen
They count as one monument and there are two of them.
Photo: Rainer Lippert
Liverpool
In fruit
In 2019 this oak took 34 percent of more than eleven thousand votes and was named England's Tree of the Year, then went on to represent England in the European competition.
Photo: Jill Jennings (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Miedzyzdroje
Miedzyzdroje named its oldest oak after a princess who lived six centuries before it did.
Photo: Panek (CC BY-SA 3.0 pl)
Two crowns married into this tree's name. Świętosława, daughter of Mieszko I and sister of Bolesław Chrobry, became queen of Sweden as the wife of Eric the Victorious and queen of Denmark as the wi...
Photo: Panek (CC BY-SA 3.0 pl)
This oak is what survives of a nineteenth century avenue that once led straight to Miedzyzdroje's parish church, and its old companion on the same planting, an oak called Apostoł, still stands clos...
Photo: Panek (CC BY-SA 3.0 pl)
This oak keeps the name of the apostle whose parish it has stood beside for two centuries: Piotr, Peter, patron of Miedzyzdroje's church, in front of whose rectory the tree grows on Lipowa Street.
Photo: Panek (CC BY-SA 3.0 pl)
Réno-Valdieu
Somebody in this French state forest named an oak after the British Forestry Commission.
Photo: Le Passant (CC BY-SA 3.0)
The storms of December 1999 took down the tall stand around this oak and left it standing.
Photo: Le Passant (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Two oaks in this grove were dedicated to universities, one to Oxford and one to Aberdeen, and this is the Scottish one.
Nobody agrees which forestry congress this oak commemorates.
Rhenen
The plateau is named after a king who had lost his kingdom.
Rouen
The oak that made this name famous is not the oak you will meet at the crossroads.
Senonches
Officially there is one tree here.
Photo: Le Passant (CC BY-SA 4.0)
This oak grew its own armchair.
Photo: Le Passant (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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