About 9,550 years old.
Photo: Karl Brodowsky (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Ancient trees in Sweden
Sweden's old trees survived on paperwork. We map 18 trees in 7 cities here. The oldest of them is Old Tjikko in Fulufjället, at root system approximately 9,550 years old; the visible trunk is only a few centuries old.
Five of the ten mapped here are boundary oaks, oaks that marked where one property ended and the next began, which made felling one a legal problem rather than a morning's work. Four of them stand in Orgryte in Gothenburg and were declared nature monuments on the same day, 14 October 2025, after a citizens' group spent years pointing out that a crash barrier was growing into the largest one. That tree, Granseken, is over six metres round and at least five hundred years old. Stockholm's are royal rather than legal: Birger Jarl's Oak at around eight hundred years, Prince Eugen's on the Waldemarsudde grounds, and the elms of Kungstradgarden, which are only two centuries old and famous anyway, because in 1971 people sat in them to stop a metro entrance and won. The oldest thing on this page is not an oak at all. Old Tjikko is a thin, wind-bent spruce on the Fulufjallet plateau whose visible trunk is a few centuries old and whose root system has been carbon dated at roughly 9,550 years. Fifteen trees so far, across Gothenburg, Stockholm and Fulufjallet.
Every place we map in Sweden
1
Stockholm8 trees · oldest 800 years2Gothenburg5 trees · oldest 800-900 years3
Ekerö1 tree · oldest 500 years4Fulufjället1 tree · oldest 9550 years5Knappfors1 tree6Rumskulla1 tree · oldest 1,000 years7
Trollskogen1 tree · oldest 800-900 years
Stockholm8 trees · oldest 800 years2Gothenburg5 trees · oldest 800-900 years3Ekerö1 tree · oldest 500 years4Fulufjället1 tree · oldest 9550 years5Knappfors1 tree6Rumskulla1 tree · oldest 1,000 years7Trollskogen1 tree · oldest 800-900 years6 species grow in Sweden
Oaks Pedunculate Oak 13 · Oak 1
Elms and zelkovas Wych Elm 1
Limes Lime 1
Conifers Norway Spruce 1
More broadleaf trees European Ash 1
The 10 oldest trees we map in Sweden
In fruit
Roughly 950 to 1,100 years old.
Roughly 800 to 900 years old.
In fruit
Roughly 800 to 900 years old.
Photo: Fry72, Karel Frydrýšek (CC BY-SA 4.0)
In fruit
Roughly 750 to 850 years old.
In fruit
Roughly 650 to 900 years old.
Photo: Holger.Ellgaard (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Roughly 500 to 700 years old.
In fruit
Roughly 400 to 600 years old.
Photo: Holger.Ellgaard (CC BY-SA 4.0)
In fruit
Roughly 400 to 450 years old.
Photo: Holger.Ellgaard (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Roughly 330 to 350 years old.
Trees from Sweden also appear in The Autumn Harvest · The Trees the World Has Written About · The Oldest Tree in Every City We Map. See every city on the map, or open the map to find what is near you.