What is the oldest tree in Tallinn?
The oldest tree in Tallinn is Kelch's Linden, which stands beside Niguliste church in the Old Town, a few minutes on foot from Town Hall Square. A ring assessment in 1999 put it at 340 to 350 years and measured the trunk at 462 centimetres round, which makes it roughly 370 years old now; a 1938 newspaper gave its planting year as 1680, which fits. It is named for Christian Kelch, the Baltic-German pastor who wrote a chronicle of Livonia and died in 1710, and the tradition in Tallinn holds that he is buried at its foot. Nobody has dug to check. The tree 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 repeatedly to keep weight off what is still holding. When Tallinn was named European Tree City in 2015, this lime was part of the case. It stands beside the church that burned in the air raid of March 1944 and took decades to rebuild; the tree, by then already close to three centuries old, needed no rebuilding.
Estonia's EELIS register of protected individual natural objects gives each tree a position, a designation date and a manager, and carries no age, girth or vitality field at all. So every year on this page comes from a measurement someone published separately: a 1999 ring assessment for Kelch's Linden, a 2017 dendrological survey for the ginkgo and for the Windecki red oak, and a hedged newspaper account for the Huecki lindens, which the culture weekly Sirp dates to 1883 with an explicit apparently. Where a figure rests on an assumption, the tree's own page says which assumption. The Windecki oak is the clearest case: its age holds only if it went into the ground with the manor park's original planting before 1886, and that if is the whole basis for the number. The register lists several dozen more protected trees in Tallinn, most of them nineteenth-century ornamental cultivars in and around Kadriorg's park planting, copper beeches and globe maples and weeping birches designated as botanical specimens rather than for age or size. See the full list of four on the Tallinn page.
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