Four trees, and they do not make one walk. Two stand in the Old Town: a hollow lime beside Niguliste church, generally called the oldest tree in Tallinn and said to have a chronicler buried at its foot, and a pair of limes planted in 1883 for two hundred years of one family at one address. A few streets away grows the largest ginkgo in Estonia, which stopped a Soviet parade grandstand in the 1980s. The fourth is out at Maarjamae, in the park of a manor house that burned down in 1995.
0 of 4 visited in Tallinn
Photo: Olaf Meister (CC BY-SA 4.0)
1
Kelch's Linden (Kelchi pärn)
Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · roughly 350-375 years · Vanalinn (Old Town)
A chronicler is said to lie under this lime. Christian Kelch, the Baltic-German pastor who wrote a chronicle of Livonia and died in 1710, gave the tree the name it still carries, and the tradition in Tallinn is that he is buried at its foot. Nobody has dug to check.
The numbers are firmer than the legend, if older than anyone would like. In 1999 the trunk measured 462 centimetres round at chest height, the tree stood 16 metres tall, and a ring assessment put it at 340 to 350 years. Carry that forward and it lands near 370 now, which sits comfortably with the other date attached to it: a 1938 newspaper gave its planting as 1680. It is generally called the oldest tree in Tallinn.
It looks its age. Two main branches are what remains of the crown, the base is hollow and has been sealed against further rot, and it has been pruned to keep weight off what is still holding. When Tallinn was named European Tree City in 2015, this tree was part of the argument.
It stands beside Niguliste, the church that burned in the air raid of March 1944 and took decades to rebuild. The lime, by then already close to three centuries old, needed no rebuilding.
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Photo: 03jansa (CC BY-SA 3.0 ee)
2
The Süda Street Ginkgo (Süda tänava hõlmikpuu)
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · over 110 years · Tatari
This tree gave the Estonian language a phrase. In the late 1980s a new Soviet parade grandstand and an annex for the Estonia Theatre would have taken out the ginkgo on the corner of Peeter Süda street. Public opposition stopped the project, and hõlmikpuu sündroom, ginkgo syndrome, has meant a building plan blocked by a protected tree ever since.
It was not born on this corner. Heinrich Kühnert brought ginkgo seed home from Germany in the late 1800s and raised it in the family's private park a few hundred metres away. When the street was widened in 1913 his son Ernst moved the tree here, and it has been measured on and off ever since: six metres tall in 1928, 8.2 metres in 1955, 13 metres with a trunk 164 centimetres round by the 2017 survey, which put its age at over 110 years. It is the largest ginkgo in Estonia and has been protected since 30 April 1966.
Its health is not perfect. In 2017 the Estonian Dendrology Society reported that the crown had gone lopsided in the shade of a neighbouring maple and needed dead wood taken out. Forty years after it beat the grandstand, planning arguments still happen around it rather than through it.
Come in late October. Ginkgos turn a hard clean yellow and then drop the lot within days.
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3
The Windecki Red Oak (Windecki punane tamm)
Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) · roughly 140-150 years · Maarjamäe, Pirita linnaosa
The house burned down in 1995. The oak the owner planted is still standing.
Robert Weisse built Windecki as a summer estate on the terrace below the Lasnamäe cliff and laid out its park before his death in 1886. The timber main house went up in flames a century later and was never rebuilt. What survived is the planting: 32 trees where there were 42 in 1995, a row of seventeen old European larches, and this red oak.
The dendrologist Olev Abner surveyed the ground in 2017 and made the case that it is probably the oldest red oak in Estonia, thicker in the trunk and taller than either of the two others the country protects individually. He recorded it at 24 metres high and 83 centimetres through. The age comes from the park rather than from a ring count: if the oak went in with Weisse's original planting, it is roughly 140 to 150 years old now, and that "if" is the whole basis for the number.
There is a second wrinkle. A 2007 survey of the same park recorded its largest red oak at the same 24 metres but only 61 centimetres through, which is either a different tree or a different tape measure. Estonia gave this one formal protection in 2020.
Maarjamäe is twenty minutes out from the centre, and the park is small enough to find it in.
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4
The Huecki Lindens (Huecki pärnad)
Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · roughly 140 years · Vanalinn (Old Town)
Two limes, planted in 1883 to mark two hundred years of one family at one address. The Huecks acquired Lai 29 in 1683 and the trees went in for the bicentenary, which is a grand way to note a property anniversary and has outlived everyone involved. Sirp, the Estonian culture weekly that records the year, hedges it with "apparently", so take 1883 as the best account anyone has rather than a documented planting.
They belong together and are protected together, listed as a single natural monument since 2009: two common limes in front of one house, each around 25 metres tall. There is one obvious place to stand, on the far pavement, where both fit in the frame at once.
The interesting part is underneath. Lai is a paved Old Town street with almost nothing beneath it for a root to work with, and Sirp describes the pair as growing in the middle of a stone desert. Whatever the family thought it was planting, the result has spent 143 years making a living out of the gaps between cobbles and cellar walls, at a size that would be respectable in a park with proper soil.
The house behind them still carries the family's name.
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