These six span twenty kilometres of Toronto, several outings rather than one afternoon. The oldest is Zhelevo, a red oak in Etobicoke that predates European settlement of the Humber River, saved when the city bought and demolished the house beside it. The official tree, in Kew Gardens, has one limb sagging to the grass. A coronation oak from 1937 anchors a ring of maples on the waterfront, Big Red holds a corner in Long Branch, a Turkish hazel survives a private nut farm, and six maples in Lambton were planted by grieving mothers on Remembrance Day, 1919.
0 of 6 visited in Toronto
1
The Kew Gardens Red Oak
Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) · roughly 220 years · The Beaches
Toronto has an official tree, and this is it. The city gave the title in 2022 to a northern red oak in Kew Gardens, a trunk 5.3 metres round under a crown reaching about 36 metres, with one long limb that sags all the way down to the grass.
Arborists read its start off a diameter of 169 centimetres and put it at roughly 220 years, with a band running from about 200 to 260. Nobody has cored it, so that band is the honest answer: it may or may not predate the founding of the town that became Toronto.
Everything else on this corner arrived afterwards. Joseph Williams farmed the land from the 1850s and ran amusement grounds beneath these branches; the city bought the 8.4 hectares in 1907. The creeks that once ran down to the lake here were culverted while the oak stood over them. Forests Ontario designated it a heritage tree in 2021, and a Heritage Toronto plaque went up in May 2023, which is late recognition for something that was already large when the first houses in the Beaches were built.
A native plant garden now grows under the low limb. Stand beside it and the limb is at shoulder height, which is not how most people expect to meet a 36 metre tree.
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2
The King's Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 89 years, planted 12 May 1937 · Fort York / CNE grounds
On 12 May 1937, while George VI was being crowned in London, Toronto put an oak in the ground on the lakeshore and planted about 150 more trees around it before the day was out.
The oak is the centre of the arrangement. Around it run concentric rings of silver maples, the Empire Circle, one ring for each dominion and colony of an empire that has since stopped existing. The rings are still there. So is the oak, 89 years on, an ordinary pedunculate oak carrying a considerable amount of ceremony: a stone and plaque beside it, dedicated by Justice John A. Hope and unveiled by Sir William Mulock in August 1938.
Then it happened again. On 6 May 2023, for the coronation of Charles III, the city planted a companion oak next to the first one and added a second plaque. Eighty-six years apart, the same gesture, the same species, the same patch of grass. The second planting is also the reason we know the first tree is still standing.
This is the youngest tree on this page and the only one whose birthday is known to the day; every other age here comes off a tape measure around a trunk. Coronation Park has since been restored in phases, and the first phase went to this oak and its circle of maples.
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3
Big Red
Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) · roughly 200 years · Long Branch
The Long Branch Hotel burned down in 1958. The oak beside it did not, and it is still on the corner.
Big Red is a northern red oak at Long Branch Avenue and Park Boulevard, named by the neighbourhood for what it does in October. Diameter measurements put its start in the late 1810s; Forests Canada rounds that to about 200 years and the early 1800s, which is close enough agreement to work with. Its height is less settled. Forests Canada records 24 metres, a 2024 local report says 33, and neither explains how it was measured, so both figures are on the record and neither has won.
In the late 1800s it stood near a fountain in the grounds of the Long Branch Grove and Resort, a lakeside destination Torontonians came out to by train. The resort went. The hotel went. The streets arrived. In 1933 the cenotaph went up beside the oak, and the tree has stood next to the names of three wars ever since, which is the reason to come in November rather than the reason to come in October.
Forests Ontario made it Long Branch's first heritage tree in April 2018, listed at 200 years. It is by some distance the oldest thing on that corner.
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4
Corsan's Turkish Hazel
Turkish Hazel (Corylus colurna) · roughly 110 years · Islington / Echo Valley
George Hebden Corsan was an internationally known swimmer and a health food evangelist, and he spent forty years proving that nut trees would grow in Ontario. This is one of the trees that proved it.
Corsan bought twelve acres here across 1911 and 1912 and turned them into a nut farm, eventually cultivating more than 400 varieties and collecting the name the Nut Man of Islington. Metropolitan Toronto bought the land in 1959 and made it Echo Valley Park, which is the only reason a private obsession is now something anyone can walk through.
The Turkish hazel is one of five of his nut trees on the heritage register, alongside a hican, a black walnut and two more walnuts. The register recorded this one at 100 years old in 2017 and dates the planting loosely to the 1900s, without tying it to Corsan's own arrival, so early last century is as close as the evidence gets. A 1971 survey by the University of Toronto's Shade Tree Research Laboratory listed Turkish hazel among the nut species still growing on the site, which is the second account standing behind the register entry.
Two honest gaps. All five trees share a single map pin, so the last part of the walk is a short hunt. And nobody has published a sighting since the 2017 nomination. If you find it, or work out which of the five is which, tell us.
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5
The Lambton Park Remembrance Trees
Silver Maple and Norway Maple (Acer saccharinum and Acer platanoides) · 107 years, planted 11 November 1919 · Lambton
Twelve local men from this part of Toronto died in the First World War. Six trees went into the ground for them on 11 November 1919, the very first Remembrance Day, planted on the lawn in front of Lambton Park Community School.
Two silver maples and four Norway maples went in with a silver-plated shovel, because the two men invited to turn the first sod, Princes Edward and Albert of England, could not make the crossing. The mothers of the fallen planted the trees themselves instead.
For most of a century the planting sat unmarked. Bonita Nelson, a descendant of two of the twelve, Reginald Gage and Sydney Moyle, nominated the trees for heritage status in 2016, and a plaque inside the school now carries all twelve names.
The register places the six trees along the school's Bernice Crescent frontage, reachable from the public sidewalk without stepping onto school grounds. The last confirmed sighting is the 2016 nomination itself, so ask at the school if you want certainty before you go, and tell us what you find. A tree planted for twelve names deserves better than an unconfirmed pin.
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6
Zhelevo, the Coral Gable Drive Red Oak
Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) · roughly 300 years · Humber Heights-Westmount, Etobicoke
In 2020 Toronto's city council voted to buy a private house on Coral Gable Drive, not to live in it, but to tear it down and save the oak growing beside it. Locals call the tree Zhelevo, after a Macedonian village, and more than 1,300 donors helped fund the years-long campaign that got the city to act before a developer could.
The oak predates the city itself. At roughly three centuries old, it stood here before European settlement reached the Humber River in 1793, part of an oak savannah that once lined the old Toronto Carrying Place trail between Lake Ontario and Lake Simcoe. Its trunk runs nearly five metres round and its crown, at 24 metres, used to dwarf the house that stood beside it.
That house is gone now. The city is building a public parkette on the lot, due to open in spring 2027, and until then the oak is visible from the street rather than walk-up, towering over a construction site instead of a front lawn. It has already survived roughly three hundred years of whatever Toronto threw at it. A couple more waiting for a gate to open is nothing.
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