In autumn 2018 a Brussels art institute adopted this tree.
Tulip Tree
Liriodendron tulipifera
You can identify it from the pavement: the leaf looks as though someone snipped the tip off with scissors, four lobes and a flat end where the point should be. We map 26 of them, in 18 cities.
Liriodendron tulipifera is a tree of the eastern United States, and there it grows wild and tall. The Queens Giant came up on its own in a stretch of Alley Pond Park's forest that was never cleared; New York dates it to at least 368 years, and it is the tallest carefully measured tree in the city. In Chapel Hill, campus legend says the University of North Carolina stands where General Davie fell asleep under one in 1792. Europe's oldest exist because of the post. On 1 October 1716 a London apothecary sent seed to Leiden, and Herman Boerhaave sowed it in the botanical garden where it still stands. Braga's, planted under João V, is called the largest in Portugal.
Brussels
Porto
Autumn colour
This American tulip tree became one of Portugal's first individually protected trees in 1950, a legal status most of the country's current laws postdate.
Photo: Paulo V. Araujo, Dias com Arvores
Autumn colour
The crown of this tulip tree is wider than the tree is tall: 23.5 metres across against 21 metres of height.
Autumn colour
Praça Pedro Nunes is small enough to cross in twenty seconds and holds four tulip trees, each about 22 metres tall.
Photo: Reis Quarteu (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Autumn colour
Two official documents give this tree's waist as 5.24 metres and 7.75 metres.
Photo: Paulo V. Araujo, Dias com Arvores
Amsterdam
Autumn colour
Jakoba Mulder helped design the Amsterdamse Bos, and then somebody planted a tree inside it in her honour.
New York
Autumn colour
This tree was already centuries old when New Amsterdam was still a Dutch trading post, and unlike almost everything else on this list, nobody planted it.
Photo: Bruce Schaff (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Autumn colour
Staten Island's tallest tree stands 119 feet, more than 14 feet shorter than Queens' record-holding tulip tree, but old enough on its own terms to anchor the north end of Clove Lakes Park, easily f...
Berlin
Most of Berlin's protected trees made the list for being rare, old or tied to the city's history.
Montreal
Autumn colour
McGill's graduating class of 1949 left a tree behind, and it is still standing beside the Redpath Museum.
Washington DC
Autumn colour
Two websites call this the second largest tree in Washington.
Autumn colour
Frederick Law Olmsted planted more than 1,050 trees on the Capitol grounds and about 45 of them are still alive.
Copenhagen
Autumn colour
The flowers this tree is named for open in June, high in the crown, and most people standing under it never see one.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Maastricht
These two tulip trees likely went into Monseigneur Nolenspark during the same 1886 westward expansion of Maastricht's Stadspark that brought in the park's black walnuts and its weeping silver limes...
Autumn colour
The tulip tree is not a European tree at all.
Geneva
Autumn colour
The château at the top of this lawn is Italy's mission to the United Nations.
Braga
Autumn colour
Portugal shortlisted this tree for its Tree of the Year in 2026, one of ten finalists nationally.
Photo: Adelino Manuel Pinhe… (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Leiden
Autumn colour
This tree exists because a London apothecary put a Virginia seed in the post.
Apeldoorn
It flowers in June and almost nobody notices, because the flowers are green and orange and they sit upright at the ends of branches twenty metres up.
Arnhem
Autumn colour
In December 2010 a local history group put a tape around this tulip tree at chest height and read 5.39 metres, then measured it at 37.5 metres tall.
Baarn
Autumn colour
Crowd trees together and they race each other.
Photo: Atsje (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Autumn colour
Baarn already has a grove of tulip trees at Kasteel Groeneveld, sixty of them racing each other skyward.
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Autumn colour
The University of North Carolina stands where it does, campus legend says, because General William R.
Photo: Michael J. Papay (CC BY)
Heerlen
Autumn colour
This tulip tree grows in the park built around the Meezenbroek ponds before the Second World War, in a district that started life in the 1920s as De Voorzorg, a colony of housing built for the mine...
Wilmington, Delaware
Autumn colour
This tulip tree is 53 metres tall, and Delaware still ranks it second.
Autumn colour
Delaware's champion tulip tree is not its tallest, and it does not need to be.
Explore by city: Brussels · Porto · Amsterdam · New York · Berlin · Montreal · Washington DC · Copenhagen · Maastricht · Geneva · Braga · Leiden · Apeldoorn · Arnhem · Baarn · Heerlen · every city · or browse all species.