Vienna keeps its oldest trees on an official register: since 1936, remarkable specimens have qualified as Naturdenkmäler, natural monuments protected the same way a listed building is. That bureaucratic habit is why this city can name an exact protection date for almost every tree on this list, down to the day. The trees below range from a plane tree Mozart is said to have walked past on his way to piano lessons to a ginkgo planted beside a composer's statue in the city's first public park. All of them are free to see.
0 of 57 visited in Vienna
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 290 years · Innere Stadt, 1st district
This tree has been quietly absorbing a piece of iron fence for two and a half centuries. The plane in the Fähnrichhof, a courtyard just off Singerstraße in Vienna's old town, grew directly through part of the railing that once enclosed St Stephen's Cathedral's own graveyard, closed to burials in the 1730s. The fence is no longer visible today. Vienna's own natural monument record notes it as sealed inside the trunk by decades of callus growth, the tree's version of scar tissue closing over a wound. A 1987 expert assessment measured the trunk at two and a half metres around, the crown at ten metres across, and put the tree's age at more than 250 years even then, which makes it well past 280 today. It stands in a courtyard once attached to the Domherrenhof, the residence of St Stephen's cathedral canons, reachable on foot through a passage from Blutgasse that locals call a Durchhaus, one of the old town's many semi-hidden pedestrian shortcuts between streets. The glass door at the Blutgasse end is usually left open during the day. Almost nobody outside the neighbourhood knows this tree exists, let alone that it is quietly digesting a piece of ecclesiastical ironwork nobody has seen in living memory.
Photo: GuentherZ (CC BY 3.0)
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · 125 years · Innere Stadt / Landstraße border, Stadtpark
Vienna's other great ginkgo does not get the attention Schönbrunn's does, despite standing a five minute walk from the cathedral. City councilman Heinrich Braun had it brought to Stadtpark and planted around 1900, decades after the species had become a fashionable import for European parks, and it now grows beside the marble statue of Franz Schubert unveiled here in 1872, close enough that photographs of one usually catch the edge of the other. Vienna declared it a protected natural monument on 3 July 1973, Naturdenkmal Nr. 569, on the grounds that a ginkgo this size is still a genuine rarity this far from its native range in China. Its own small plaque, bolted to the trunk, calls it by the old German name for the species: Fächerblätterbaum, the fan-leaf tree. Stadtpark itself was Vienna's first purpose-built public park, opened in 1862 along the Wien river specifically so the city's middle class would have somewhere to walk that was not a royal garden. The ginkgo has spent well over a century doing exactly that: watching Viennese office workers, tourists and dog walkers cross the park on their way to somewhere else, then turning, every autumn, the same uniform gold as its more famous cousin across town.
Photo: GuentherZ (CC BY 3.0)
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · 186 years · Leopoldstadt, 2nd district
Vienna's grandest avenue is older than the trees that define it by two centuries. The Hauptallee was cut through the Prater's floodplain forest in 1538, on the order of Emperor Ferdinand I, to connect the Augarten with the imperial hunting grounds, but the horse chestnuts that now line it in four to six dense rows came generations later. Vienna's own municipal tree registry documents the oldest surviving specimen, a 254cm-girth chestnut near Praterstern, as planted in 1840, a real, individually recorded tree rather than a rounded guess. Roughly 2,600 avenue trees run along the full 4.5 kilometre length, from Praterstern at one end to the Lusthaus, a former imperial hunting lodge, at the other, making this one of the longest tree-lined avenues in Europe. For a few weeks each spring the chestnuts turn the entire route white with candle-shaped blossom, an event Viennese joggers and cyclists plan routes around rather than merely notice. The avenue has hosted horse races, carriage parades, and, for decades, the finish straight of the Vienna City Marathon. Not every tree on the Hauptallee is old. Storms, disease, and simple traffic have taken their share over five centuries, and new chestnuts are replanted as older ones fail, which is exactly why this is a walk through a living tradition rather than a search for a single ancient trunk.
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · 245 years · Hietzing, 13th district
This is one tree with two sexes. Ginkgos are either male or female, never both, except this one: a female branch was grafted onto it at some point in its life, so a single male tree now also drops the messy, strong-smelling seeds normally produced only by female ginkgos. It arrived in Vienna in 1781, imported through an English nursery only a few decades after the species reached Europe at all, and it is very likely the oldest ginkgo now growing in Austria. It stands in Schönbrunn's Botanical Garden, on the palace park's eastern side, its trunk grown to roughly five metres around and its crown to about twenty metres tall. Vienna listed it as a protected natural monument in 1939, one of the earliest ginkgos anywhere to receive that kind of formal status. It has outlived the empire that planted it and survived two world wars a few hundred metres from a palace that changed hands more than once, and each autumn it still does what ginkgos are famous for: every leaf on the tree turns gold and drops within days, all at once, rather than drifting down gradually like almost everything else in the park.
Photo: Wolfgang H. Wögerer, Wien, Austria (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 245 years · Landstraße, 3rd district
A memorial stone at its base calls this tree the Jacquin-Platane, but almost nobody in Vienna uses that name. Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin planted it around 1780 as director of the university's Botanical Garden, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart walked past it often enough, on his way to piano lessons at Jacquin's house nearby, that the tree took his name instead. It has stood on Rennweg since before the French Revolution, and it has been protected as one of Vienna's first natural monuments since 1936, registered simply as Naturdenkmal Nr. 9. A property boundary shifted at some point in its life, and the tree now grows on the public sidewalk, just outside the fence of the Botanical Institute it once stood inside. Its trunk, roughly six metres around, has gone partially hollow with age, and Vienna's parks department now lists it as endangered. In 2009 the city closed Rennweg overnight and tested the tree's stability with rope winches, treating a quarter-millennium-old plane tree with the same seriousness as a structural inspection. It is around 245 years old now, close enough to Mozart's own lifetime that the story holds up better than most tree legends do.
Photo: GuentherZ (CC BY 3.0)
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 150-245 years · Innere Stadt, 1st district
The oldest tree in front of Vienna's City Hall is older than the building itself by exactly one century. Two records disagree about this tree by ninety years. Tradition puts it in the ground in 1783, when the site was open land beyond the city. The city's own tree register says 1876, three years after the park was laid out, and gives that same year to every monument here, which is what a register writes down when a park is planted at once. Nobody has counted its rings. Construction of the neo-Gothic town hall did not start until 1872, and the park was landscaped around the new building only after that, which means this tree had already been growing for close to ninety years by the time the space around it became a park at all. It has since grown into a trunk six metres around and a crown thirty metres tall, big enough that Vienna's own tree registry lists it, under catalogue number 252, as Rathauspark's oldest specimen without qualification. It is one of three plane trees in the park with individual legal protection as natural monuments, granted in 1973. Office workers on lunch break, tourists cutting through on their way to the Burgtheater, and the occasional wedding photographer all pass beneath a canopy that was already mature when Mozart was writing his last symphonies, in a park that did not exist yet to contain it.
Photo: GuentherZ (CC BY 3.0)
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 180-220 years · Innere Stadt, 1st district
Vienna named this plane tree after an empress who famously disliked Vienna. The Sisi-Platane stands near the fountain at the heart of the Volksgarten, close to the Theseus Temple, and at an estimated 200 years old it is the oldest tree in a garden that Empress Elisabeth, who gave the tree her nickname, mostly used as a shortcut on her way to somewhere else. She preferred riding and travelling to sitting still in Viennese gardens, but the name stuck anyway. The trunk now measures roughly three and a half metres around, and the crown spans a full twenty metres in every direction, wide enough to shade a large share of the garden's central lawn on a summer afternoon. Vienna placed it under legal protection in 1951 as Naturdenkmal Nr. 376, one of a small number of individually registered trees in the first district. Its exact age has not turned up in any planting record, only an estimate based on its size, so it should be read as approximate rather than precise. What nobody disputes is its rank: nothing else growing in the Volksgarten today is older, and few Viennese park benches offer a better patch of shade.
Photo: Michael Kranewitter (CC BY-SA 3.0 AT)
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 150-250 years · Leopoldstadt, 2nd district
Its crown alone covers more ground than most Viennese apartment buildings. The pedunculate oak of the Sulzwiese, a meadow in the Grüner Prater away from the funfair and the Ferris wheel, has a canopy that spreads roughly 45 metres across, wide enough that someone standing under one edge of it cannot see a person standing under the other through the branches. The trunk itself is a comparatively modest 4.28 metres around, which tells you this tree grew in the open, in full sun, with nothing crowding its sides, rather than competing for light in a forest the way most old oaks do. That kind of open-grown oak puts its energy into width rather than height, and the Sulzwiese oak is a textbook result: a low, spreading giant rather than a tall one. No planting record has surfaced to say exactly how old it is, so any figure here is an estimate rather than a fact, but a crown this size on an open-grown oak typically points to somewhere between 150 and 250 years, a wide range stated honestly rather than rounded to something tidier. Vienna registered it as Naturdenkmal Nr. 846, one of eighteen protected natural monuments in the Prater's home district of Leopoldstadt, and it remains one of the most photographed trees in the park precisely because its shape is so unusual.
Photo: Clemens Mosch (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · 80-150 years · Währing, 18th district
Every giant sequoia growing in Europe today is, at most, about 170 years old, because the species was not seen by Europeans until 1852 and not exported until 1853. That upper limit makes the two giant sequoias flanking the main entrance to Pötzleinsdorfer Schlosspark impressive for what they are not: they cannot be nearly as old as the palace park around them, which the Geymüller banking family began landscaping in 1801, decades before anyone in Europe had seen a sequoia seed. They were planted later, sometime after 1853, as one of the many exotic imports that Vienna's wealthy families competed to add to their English-style gardens once the species became available, a horticultural fashion sometimes called Wellingtonia mania. Two smaller sequoias grow between the pair near the entrance, part of the same planting. The park itself, one of Vienna's largest and least manicured, is known for long open meadows dotted with individual specimen trees rather than dense woodland, and the sequoias are its most conspicuous residents: nothing else in the park comes close to their bulk or their soft, reddish, fibrous bark. No precise planting date or trunk measurement has surfaced for this specific pair, so their age here is bounded by what is known about the species rather than stated as documented fact.
Photo: ZavosBrachides (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Mixed species (Ginkgo and Giant Sequoia) · 90-130 years · Währing, 18th district
Two trees, planted side by side, share a single protection order. In the Sternwartepark, in the shadow of Vienna's university observatory, a ginkgo and a giant sequoia grow close enough together that Vienna registered them as one natural monument in 2010, Naturdenkmal Nr. 817, rather than two. They make an odd pair. The ginkgo, a living fossil native to China, was already around a century old when it was surveyed, with a trunk 2.35 metres around and a height of 24 metres. Next to it stands a Californian giant sequoia that has grown taller, 27 metres, but leans noticeably as it climbs, its 3.75 metre trunk curving rather than running straight up the way most conifers do. Neither species is native within a continent of Vienna, and the two would never have met each other in the wild, yet here they have spent a century as neighbours a few streets from Türkenschanzpark, itself planted with exotic species through Vienna university's old botanical connections. The observatory nearby, the largest structurally closed telescope building in the world when it opened in 1879, gives the whole park its name. Astronomers looking skyward have had these two very different giants growing at ground level the entire time.
Photo: Michael Kranewitter (CC BY-SA 3.0 AT)
Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) · 187 years · Josefstadt, 8th district
Vienna's tree registry lists nearly nine hundred trees in the eighth district and gives this one a girth of 489 centimetres, which makes it comfortably the thickest thing growing in Josefstadt. The lime stands beside the pond in Schönbornpark, the garden of the Palais Schönborn, and the city dates its planting to 1839. That is twenty-three years before the Schönborn family sold the grounds to the municipality and the private garden became a public park, so the tree spent its first two decades behind a wall, in a palace garden nobody was allowed into. The palace itself, built between 1706 and 1711 to a design by Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt, has housed the Volkskundemuseum since 1917, which means the lime now shades a lawn where people eat lunch between looking at Austrian farmhouse furniture. At 26 to 30 metres it is taller than the palace behind it. Large-leaved limes flower earlier than the small-leaved kind, usually the middle two weeks of June, and when this one goes off the whole park smells of it and the crown audibly hums. Bring something to sit on. The benches around the pond fill up fast on the first properly warm evening of the year, and locals know exactly which fortnight to come for.
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 200 years · Josefstadt, 8th district
There used to be two of them. Vienna protected a pair of oriental planes on Landesgerichtsstraße in July 1956, recording trunk girths of 2.1 and 3.6 metres, and today both the monument register and the city's tree catalogue find exactly one oriental plane on the entire street. The survivor is the bigger one, now 445 centimetres around and 21 to 25 metres tall, and its two record-keepers disagree pleasantly about its birthday: the protection decree guessed it was planted around 1835, the tree catalogue writes 1815. Either way it beat the building it stands in front of. The Landesgericht für Strafsachen, the grey slab of a criminal court Viennese people simply call the Graues Haus, went up between 1831 and 1839 on ground that had been the citizens' shooting range and, before that, the St Stephanus cemetery. So the plane was already rooted while the site was still a rifle range on the edge of town, decades before the city walls came down and the Ringstrasse was drawn. It has since spent nearly two centuries a few metres from the door people are led through on the worst day of their lives. Nobody planted it as a memorial to anything. It simply outlasted every use the ground has been put to.
Fern-leaved Beech (Fagus sylvatica 'Laciniata') · 153 years · Innere Stadt, 1st district
Four hundred and forty-nine trees are individually registered in the Rathauspark and this one has the thickest trunk of the lot, six metres around, beating the park's famous plane trees by a few centimetres. It is also the strangest looking. A fern-leaved beech is a cultivated freak of the common beech whose leaves come out shredded into narrow ribbons, so from a distance the canopy reads as feathery rather than solid, and up close you keep checking whether you are looking at a beech at all. Vienna gave it legal protection in July 1973, the same day it protected three of the park's planes. Its trunk is the reason to come. Rather than one clean column it goes up as a fused mass of grey limbs that split at head height and lean outward in every direction, with the roots buttressing out across bare earth where a century and a half of feet have worn the grass away. Generations of Viennese have carved initials into it, all healed over into pale scars. The park was laid out in 1873, which is also the year the city gives as this tree's planting, so it has stood in front of the town hall for as long as there has been a town hall to stand in front of.
Photo: Michael Kranewitter (CC BY-SA 3.0 AT)
Persian Ironwood (Parrotia persica) · 85-110 years · Innere Stadt, 1st district
This tree is twice as wide as it is tall. The Persian ironwood on Schmerlingplatz stands between 6 and 10 metres high and throws a crown 16 to 18 metres across, which is what the species does when nobody crowds it: instead of a trunk it grows a low fused knot of leaning stems that peel in grey, green and fawn plates like a plane tree's, then spreads sideways until it makes its own room. The city measures the base at 460 centimetres around, an exceptional figure for a species most European gardens never get past arm's width. Vienna protected it on 5 November 1956, and the stated reason was not its age or size but simply its rarity. Parrotia persica grows wild only in the Caspian forests of northern Iran and Azerbaijan, and in the 1950s a full-grown one in a Vienna square was worth a legal decree. What it does in late October is the reason to walk over. The leaves do not turn a single colour, they turn several at once and unevenly, so one branch goes scarlet while the next is still green and a third has already reached amber, and the whole low dome ends up looking backlit even under grey sky. The small park around it, a wedge of grass beside the Justizpalast, was named in 2016 after Grete Rehor, the first woman to hold a ministry in Austria.
Photo: Thomas Ledl (CC BY-SA 3.0 AT)
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · 105 years · Innere Stadt, 1st district
Come in July and this tree is hung with several hundred green ropes. The Caucasian wingnut fruits in chains up to half a metre long, each one a string of little winged nutlets that dangle straight down from the branch tips and stay there, greening, then browning, into autumn. No other tree in the Stadtpark does anything remotely like it, and most people who stop have no idea what they are looking at. Vienna put it under protection on 16 December 1941, in the middle of a war, as Naturdenkmal Nr. 280. The city's tree catalogue dates it to 1921 and gives its trunk as 308 centimetres around under a crown 16 to 18 metres wide. It also lists two more wingnuts of exactly the same age within five metres, which is not an accident of record keeping: this species suckers hard from the root plate, sending up new stems around the parent until one tree slowly becomes a thicket of itself. The old bark helps you find it. Wingnut bark is deeply corded and ridged, closer to a very old ash than to the walnut it is related to, and this one carries its enamel monument plaque half swallowed by ivy about chest height. It stands near the Wien river, two minutes from the ginkgo by the Schubert monument.
Japanese Pagoda Tree (Styphnolobium japonicum) · 166 years · Innere Stadt, 1st district
Vienna's tree catalogue dates this one to 1860, and the Stadtpark did not open until August 1862. Whichever way you read that, the pagoda tree was in the ground before the park was, either as one of the very first things planted while the Wien river bank was still a building site or as a tree the landscapers found there and kept. It has grown to 444 centimetres around and stands 21 to 25 metres, on a trunk that forks low and then leans away from itself in two directions at once, so it looks less like a park specimen than like something that had to negotiate for its light. Styphnolobium japonicum is the tree Chinese emperors were buried under and Beijing planted along its temple approaches, and it earns its place in a European park by flowering at the one time of year when almost nothing else does. Late July into August it covers itself in loose sprays of small cream pea-flowers, then drops them, and for a week the path underneath is pale with them. Vienna protected it on 16 December 1941 as Naturdenkmal Nr. 276, the same day it protected the wingnut a hundred and sixty metres away. Both are still here.
Photo: Thomas Ledl (CC BY-SA 3.0 AT)
Judas Tree (Cercis siliquastrum) · 130-240 years · Alsergrund, 9th district
This tree flowers straight out of its own trunk. In spring, before a single leaf opens, Cercis siliquastrum covers itself in rosy-pink flowers barely two centimetres across, and they push out not only from the twigs but from the branches and the old wood of the trunk itself. It is a habit called cauliflory, common in the tropics and close to unknown on a street in central Europe. Its age is a genuine argument. Vienna protected it on 14 February 1995 on the grounds that it was already well over a hundred years old, which puts a hard floor of roughly 130 years under it today. Local reporting adds that it was probably planted in the eighteenth century, along with the institute buildings around it, which would make it closer to 240. Nothing settles that, so the range stays wide. Even its monument number is disputed: most sources call it Nr. 762, while the city's own 2025 press release calls it Nr. 769. The courtyard was part of one of the most modern hospitals in the world when Joseph II opened the Allgemeines Krankenhaus in 1784, on ground that had held a poorhouse since 1693. The hospital moved out and the University of Vienna took the buildings in 1998, so the second courtyard now has cafe tables around it. The tree grows as ten old stems with young shoots between them, renewing itself indefinitely as long as nobody tidies it up.
Photo: Haeferl (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Field Elm (Ulmus minor) · 111 years · Neubau, 7th district
Europe lost most of its large elms in the second half of the twentieth century, which is reason enough to look at a field elm planted in 1915 and still standing. Ulmus minor was the species Dutch elm disease hit hardest: a fungus carried tree to tree by bark beetles that killed the great majority of Europe's mature elms from the 1960s onward. No record says this particular tree survived a particular outbreak. It simply kept going while the species around it did not. It grows on the narrow green strip down the middle of Burggasse, between the roadway and a service lane, which is an odd address for a protected natural monument and is precisely why it earned the status. Vienna's tree catalogue gives the planting year as 1915, a trunk 290 centimetres around, a height of 16 to 20 metres and a crown almost as wide as the tree is tall. The city protected it on 8 August 2006 as Naturdenkmal Nr. 794, and the decree's stated reason is plain: its size, and what it does for the character of the street. Two city departments record it at two different addresses, one calling it Burggasse 26 and the other Burggasse 39. Only one field elm appears in the whole Neubau district list, so this is one tree with two addresses. Its crown is cut back regularly for the power lines and the traffic, so expect a working street tree rather than a park specimen.
Turkish Hazel (Corylus colurna) · ~120 years · Wieden, 4th district
Vienna protected these two trees for looking alike. Naturdenkmal Nr. 545, granted on 25 April 1972, covers a pair of Turkish hazels standing opposite the main entrance of the Technical University, and the reason recorded for the designation is their uniform growth and their appearance as a pair, not anything about either tree on its own. They are not twins. The city tree catalogue dates one to 1900 and the other to 1917, seventeen years apart, with trunks of 281 and 237 centimetres, and they stand about thirty metres from each other in the same sightline. That they grew into a matched pair regardless says something about the species. Corylus colurna is the tree-sized hazel of the Balkans, Anatolia and the Caucasus, and it builds a stubbornly regular cone on one straight trunk, which is why cities plant it along streets and why these two arrived at the same silhouette from different decades. It is also why they are the oldest trees in this small park and still look like street furniture rather than veterans. Resselpark is named for Josef Ressel, who patented a screw propeller in 1827 and watched other people make it work. It lies between the Karlsplatz and the Karlskirche, so the hazels look straight at Fischer von Erlach's dome and its two carved columns, and the Secession building is five minutes west. Both trees stand on open public ground at any hour.
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 290 years · Hietzing, 13th district
Two Oriental planes stand in front of the Hietzing parish church, and the district tells their story as a thank-offering for surviving the plague. By that account, published by the district office, Countess Scalquiogni, a lady-in-waiting at the Habsburg court, gave Hietzing three plane trees in 1732 in gratitude for coming through an epidemic. Two of the three are still here. In April 2020 the district called them 288 years old, which fits that date to the year.
Vienna's own tree cadastre disagrees, and not by a little. It records the same two trunks as planted in 1810 and 1860, which would make the younger of the pair a nineteenth century street tree rather than a Baroque gift. Both readings are on the record. The 1732 account is the more specific and comes with a name attached; the cadastre is the city's working inventory. Expect the truth to sit somewhere in that gap.
They measure about 4.2 metres around each and stand 13 metres apart, on a square that has been Hietzing's Sunday gathering place since the Middle Ages. Vienna protected the pair as a single natural monument, number 122, in March 1939.
In late February 2020 the storm named Yulia tore into both crowns. The district had them pruned back for safety and cabled, which is what the steel running through the canopy is holding together.
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 150-400 years · Hietzing, 13th district
In September 1941 three trees in one corner of Schönbrunn's botanical garden were put under protection. A survey of Vienna's natural monuments printed in 1949 went back through the list and marked one of them destroyed by war events, a Japanese pagoda tree that stood about thirty metres from here. This oak is one of the two that came through. The yew twelve metres away is the other.
No source will give it an age. The register recorded none in 1941 and has recorded none since, so what there is to go on is the trunk: 6.21 metres around, measured a metre off the ground. A tree that thick has been growing for centuries, but girth alone will not say how many and nobody has counted, so any single figure you see for this oak is somebody's estimate.
The ground explains the tree. This was the Habsburgs' own botanical garden, begun in the 1750s and stocked from imperial collecting expeditions, and Schönbrunn is federal property rather than municipal, which is why Vienna's city tree inventory has no record of this oak at all. The pedunculate oak was there as the native, the plainest thing in a garden full of imports.
Come in through the Hietzinger Tor. The botanical garden is free and open daily; the Palm House and the Gloriette a short walk away are separate tickets and a different afternoon.
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · 85-300 years · Hietzing, 13th district
Nobody has measured this tree. There is no girth on file, no height, no age and no photograph in the usual archives. What exists is a line in Vienna's register of natural monuments, number 181, protected on 4 September 1941, and a printed survey from 1949 that lists it again with nothing written beside it.
That blank is the point. The same 1949 survey marks the tree that stood about thirty metres away, a Japanese pagoda tree carrying number 179, as destroyed by war events. This yew and the oak twelve metres from it carry no such note, which is the nearest thing to a wartime health certificate a tree can hold.
Yews reward exactly this kind of neglect. Taxus baccata grows slowly, tolerates deep shade and hard cutting, and can carry on for centuries without ever getting spectacular enough to attract a tape measure, which is roughly how a protected tree spends eighty-five years on a government list without acquiring a single number.
So this one comes with an honest hole in it. It stands in the corner of Schönbrunn's botanical garden near the Hietzinger Tor, it has been there since before the bombing, and it looks the same in February as it does in July, which is what a yew is for. The garden itself is free and open daily. If you get a tape around it, tell us what it says.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 100 years · Innere Stadt, 1st district
Planted in 1928, and already four metres thirty-four around the trunk. That is what a London plane does with a century and enough root room, and it is why people looking at a tree like this guess two or three hundred years. Vienna's tree cadastre has the planting year written down, which ends the guessing before it starts.
The city protects it as a Naturdenkmal, a natural monument, which for a street tree means it is not going to be removed for roadworks or sightlines. It stands on the Ring between Stubentor and the Stadtpark, on a stretch that otherwise runs the better part of a kilometre without a protected tree, so it fills a real gap for anyone walking the Ring for its trees rather than its buildings.
The square carries the name of Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910, whose antisemitic politics have kept that name under public argument in the city for decades and keep it there now. The tree went into the ground eighteen years after he left office. It is the address you will be looking for.
Both records of this tree, the monument register and the cadastre, are Vienna's own. They agree with each other, which is not the same as two independent sources, and the trunk figure is a measurement rather than an estimate.
Photo: Flora_DUMO (CC BY)
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · Landstraße, 3rd district
Vienna protects this oak as a natural monument and has published almost nothing else about it. No planting year, no trunk measurement, no entry in the city's tree cadastre, which lists Vienna's street and park trees by the hundred thousand. There is a register line saying the tree is protected, and there is the tree.
Better to say that plainly than to fill it in. A pedunculate oak in the third district is unusual on its own account: Vienna's streets were planted with planes, limes and maples, species that tolerate a pavement, while Quercus robur is a tree of heavy field soil and river meadow and rarely gets a city street to itself. This one stands on Grimmelshausengasse, a short residential road in Landstrasse, roughly midway between the Stadtpark and Rennweg, and somebody with the authority to do it decided it was worth protecting.
The street is named after Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, who published Simplicissimus in 1668, drawing on his own childhood in the Thirty Years War, and produced one of the first great novels in German and still one of the bleakest. The oak is nowhere near that old. Nothing at all says how old it is, which is why the age here is empty rather than approximate. Go for the tree, not for the paperwork.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 150 years · Rathauspark, Innere Stadt
Vienna's tree register says this plane was planted in 1873. It gives that same year to every protected tree in the Rathauspark, and 1873 is when the park itself was laid out around the new town hall. That is what a register writes down when a whole park goes in at once, so the date says more about the city's paperwork than about this tree. Several of the park's trees arrived as mature stock, already grown on the day they were planted. The honest answer on age is a band rather than a year, somewhere between a century and 160 years, and nobody has counted the rings.
The trunk has been measured, and it comes to 5.97 metres around, within a few centimetres of the thickest in the park. Vienna gave it individual legal protection as a natural monument in 1973, one of three planes here to get it.
Even at the low end of that range it has stood through the annexation of 1938, the war, and the ten years of four-power occupation that followed, all of it playing out around the building it faces. The famous plane is at the front of the park with a legend and a disputed 1783 date attached to it. This one is at the north end doing the same work with none of the attention, a mottled grey column splitting into heavy limbs under a crown wide enough to shade that corner on its own.
Photo: GuentherZ (CC BY 3.0)
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · Unter St. Veit, Hietzing
Most of the protected trees in this corner of Vienna stand in private courtyards. This one stands on the pavement. Hietzing's list of natural monuments reads largely as addresses with "im Hof" after them, in the courtyard, behind a gate somebody else controls. The entry for this plane says "Hügelgasse, vor Nr. 7", in front of house number 7, which is the difference between a tree you can read about and a tree you can put your hand on.
It is not the biggest plane in Vienna and does not pretend to be. The trunk measures 2.2 metres around. What it has is a crown 16 metres across on an 18 metre frame, which on a narrow residential street means it covers the road, both pavements and the fronts of the houses on either side. In summer the whole block sits under it.
Vienna entered it on the register of natural monuments on 17 January 1955, four months before the State Treaty ended the four-power occupation of the country. It has held the same patch of pavement in Unter St. Veit, the villa quarter west of Schönbrunn, ever since.
Nobody has put an age on it. The register carries its height, its girth and the day it was protected, and nothing at all about when it went into the ground. If you know, tell us.
Photo: HeinzLW (CC BY-SA 3.0 at)
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 130 years · Alsergrund
A protected plane on Alser Strasse has stood for about a century and a half without ever making it into the walk Vienna's other planes did. The city's tree register puts its planting at 1894 and its trunk at 3.15 metres around, modest next to the giants of the Rathauspark a few stops away but enough on its own to earn the tree individual legal protection.
Alsergrund is the district built around Vienna's old General Hospital, and this stretch of Alser Strasse runs past the hospital's former grounds, now the University of Vienna's main campus. Most of the city's protected trees cluster inside the Ringstrasse parks a kilometre south. This one stands alone on an ordinary street, marked out only by being larger than a street tree here is expected to get.
It grows on the public footpath, a short walk from the U6 station that shares the street's name. The register gives no reason beyond its own measurements: no legend, no named planter, just a plane that outgrew its neighbours and got a law written around it.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 153 years · Innere Stadt, 1st district
Rathauspark's plane trees carry three separate protection orders, all granted the same day in 1973, and this is the last of the set to make it onto this page. The first two already here, one with a six-metre trunk and a rumoured planting year of 1783, the other just under six metres round, get the story so far. This one is smaller, 526 centimetres, but belongs to exactly the same legal designation and stands only 55 metres from the second, close enough that a single stop in the park now takes in all three.
Vienna's own tree register gives every protected tree in Rathauspark the same planting year, 1873, the year the park itself was laid out around the new town hall. That is a blanket date rather than a measurement, the kind a register writes when a whole park goes in at once, so read the resulting age, around a century and a half, as an estimate rather than a count of rings.
It stands a three-minute walk from the Rathaus U-Bahn stop, free and open at any time, on the same lawn as its two sibling planes and the park's fern-leaved beech, which between them make Rathauspark one of the densest single stops on this whole page.
Photo: GuentherZ (CC BY 3.0)
Austrian Pine (Pinus nigra) · Wahring, 18th district
Ebner-Eschenbach-Park takes its name from Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, the Austrian writer whose village stories and epigrams made her one of the most important German-language writers of her era, and this Austrian pine has stood on the park's lawn for longer than the park has carried her name. Vienna protected the tree as a natural monument in 1942, citing its size and its role in the park's landscape, but nobody has published a girth, a height or a planting year for it since, an unusually thin record for a tree the city thought worth protecting outright.
Austrian pine, Pinus nigra, is native to the mountains ringing the Mediterranean and was planted across Vienna's parks through the nineteenth century for its tolerance of poor, dry soil, exactly the conditions of ground that had recently been fields rather than forest. This one has had eight decades of legal protection and, going by the timing of that 1942 order, considerably longer than that actually growing.
The park itself is small, about 6,200 square metres, bordered by Klostergasse and three other streets in the Cottage district of Wahring, open at all times with playgrounds and lawns around it. It sits roughly 850 metres from the ginkgo and giant sequoia already published at Sternwartepark, close enough to walk between the two on the same outing.
Sessile Oak (Quercus petraea) · Prater, Leopoldstadt, 2nd district
This sessile oak stands on Belvedereallee, a quieter stretch of the Prater than the chestnut-lined Hauptallee that gets all the postcards, in what is left of the floodplain forest that covered this ground before Emperor Ferdinand I ordered the first avenue cut through it in 1538. Vienna protected the tree as a natural monument in 2009, recording a trunk 4.5 metres round at chest height and a crown spreading close to 29 metres, big enough that Naturdenkmal Nr. 818 reads more like a description of a small wood than a single specimen.
Nobody has published an age for it, and this pass has not guessed one: sessile oaks growing wild in a remnant floodplain forest do not follow the growth-rate tables a planted park tree does, so a girth-based estimate here would be a guess dressed as a number rather than the honest gap it actually is.
It stands roughly 1.8 kilometres from the Hauptallee chestnuts, deep enough into the Prater that reaching it means committing to the park rather than passing through it: a 45-minute walk from Praterstern, or a shorter bus ride to the Freudenau or Lusthaus stops nearby. Free, open at all times, no ticket and no gate.
Photo: GuentherZ (CC BY-SA 3.0 at)
Southern Catalpa (Catalpa bignonioides) · 49 years · Neubau
Vienna's tree register lists this catalpa as a Kugeltrompetenbaum, a ball trumpet tree, and the name is the whole shape of it: a standard trunk topped with a dense, perfectly round crown that never happens by accident. Catalpa bignonioides 'Nana' is a dwarf cultivar, grafted rather than grown from seed, and left alone it would form nothing like a sphere. The roundness is decades of pruning holding a shape somebody chose on purpose.
The city's Baumkataster dates this one to 1977, which makes it not far off fifty years old, with a trunk 117 centimetres round, modest for a catalpa but ordinary for a cultivar bred to stay small. It grows on Schrankgasse in Neubau, Vienna's 7th district, a short walk from the inner Ring, one of two ball headed catalpas standing together at the same address.
The ordinary Southern Catalpa is a big, loose limbed tree known for coming into leaf absurdly late and for the thin bean-like pods that give it the name Indian bean tree. This is the same species wearing a haircut. The leaves and the flowers, when they come, belong to the same plant, just carried on a crown somebody has kept a sphere for half a century.
Single-sourced on the city's own tree register; no independent account of this specific tree has turned up yet.
Southern Catalpa (Catalpa bignonioides) · 10 years · Neubau
Its neighbour a few metres away has had fifty years to grow into its shape. This one has had ten, and it shows: a trunk 37 centimetres round against the older tree's 117, both recorded on the same Baumkataster page for Schrankgasse in Neubau.
Vienna planted this second ball headed catalpa here in 2016, an ordinary piece of municipal tree planting, except that it leaves a pair of the same cultivar standing together at two very different ages, close enough to compare by eye. Catalpa bignonioides 'Nana' is grafted onto a standard trunk and pruned into a dense globe that the wild form of the species never makes on its own. Nurseries sell the young graft as an already-finished shape, and the city's job afterward is mostly keeping it that way.
It will be decades before this one closes the gap with its older neighbour, if it ever does, since a Kugelbaum's ceiling is set at the nursery more than in the ground. For now it is the smaller half of a small, tidy pair on an ordinary Vienna street, worth a look precisely because the older tree beside it shows what fifty more years does to the same shape.
Register-only source, like its neighbour; nothing else has been found about it yet.
Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) · Oberdöbling (19th district)
Six metres round at chest height, and then the trunk stops being one trunk. About two metres up it divides into seven massive stems, and some of those divide again a metre higher. Part of the tree is hollow, and still the crown spreads 23 metres across. Vienna lists it as Natural Monument 828, protected in February 2012 together with three neighbours in the same park, and it is the thickest of the four by a wide margin: the park's Turkish hazel measures 3.5 metres and its service tree 2.3.
The city's tree cadastre records the lime at 605 centimetres and gives no planting year, so nobody has written down how old it is, and we will not guess. The ground itself has a paper trail. In 1834 the textile manufacturer Rudolf von Arthaber built a country house here and laid out a private garden. It later passed to the banker Leopold von Wertheimstein and his wife Josephine, whose circle included the writer Ferdinand von Saar, who has a bust in the park today. Whether this lime stood in their garden, no source says.
What you can say from the path is simpler. A large-leaved lime has grown into a candelabra of seven trunks, is hollowing slowly from the inside, and is very much alive. The park falls steeply toward the Donaukanal, so come in from the Döblinger Hauptstraße side and walk down to it.
Turkish Hazel (Corylus colurna) · Oberdöbling (19th district)
A Turkish hazel with a crown 25 metres wide is a surprise, because this is a species usually met as a neat, narrow street tree. Here, in the Wertheimsteinpark, one has been left to do what it wants. The trunk measures 3.5 metres round at a metre above the ground, and the crown spreads wider than the tree is tall. The city's tree cadastre puts its height in the 16 to 20 metre class, so it is a tree built outward rather than upward.
Vienna protected it in February 2012 as Natural Monument 827, the same day as three other trees in this park. The register gives no age and neither does the cadastre, which records no planting year, so the number of years it has stood here stays an open question. Girth for girth it is a heavy tree for its kind, and the crown, not the trunk, is the reason somebody wanted it kept.
Turkish hazel comes from south-eastern Europe and Asia Minor, and its corky, flaking bark gives it an architectural look in winter, when the shape of the crown is easiest to read. The park slopes down toward the Donaukanal and holds many old and exotic plants, so it makes sense to take this tree together with the lime and the service tree on the way.
Service Tree (Sorbus domestica) · Oberdöbling (19th district)
Most people walk past a service tree without knowing what it is, and in Central Europe that is partly because there are so few of them. Sorbus domestica is a scarce, slow-growing relative of the rowan, and this one in the Wertheimsteinpark is 2.3 metres round at a metre above the ground, with a crown about 13 metres across. The city's tree cadastre measures it at 236 centimetres and puts its height in the 16 to 20 metre class.
Vienna protected it in February 2012 as Natural Monument 829, one of four trees in this park given that status on the same day. It is the smallest of the four in girth, and the only one that is a rarity by species rather than by size: the lime beside it is the giant, the service tree is the curiosity.
The fruit is the reason the species has a name in German. Speierling, the small pear-shaped fruit, is traditionally added to apple wine in parts of Germany, where its tannins are valued. In Vienna's park it stands without a label of that kind, so look for pinnate leaves like an ash and flaking, scaly bark on an old trunk, and check the fruit if you come in autumn. No planting year is recorded for it, so we do not offer an age.
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · 130 years · Wieden (4th district)
When a city protects a tree for its profile, it is saying something simple: this one shapes the neighbourhood. Vienna entered the beech of the Alois-Drasche-Park in June 2018 as Natural Monument 842, and its description is exactly that, a mighty free-standing crown that marks the character of its surroundings. A beech grows into that shape only when nothing has crowded it for a long time.
The city's tree cadastre puts the planting at 1895, which makes it about 130 years old, and records the trunk at 337 centimetres round and the height in the 21 to 25 metre class. A planting year in a cadastre is a record rather than a birth certificate, so read the age as a broad range, but it fits the girth: a beech with a trunk like this is a large tree by any standard.
The park is a small green block in Wieden, a short walk from the Hauptbahnhof, and the beech is the thing in it you notice from a distance. A Serbian spruce and a yew stand beside it, both recorded in the cadastre as planted around 2000. They make a useful scale: the beech has been growing for more than four times as long as either. It is one of the more recently protected Natural Monuments in the register, and one of the easiest to reach.
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · Favoriten (10th district)
The city protected these two trees for a reason that is almost modest: rarity. Natural Monument 845, entered in January 2019, covers a pair of Caucasian wingnuts in the Waldmüllerpark in Favoriten, which the register says deserve keeping because of their scarcity and the character they give the landscape. Nothing is claimed about age or fame. The case rests on the trees themselves.
The cadastre measures one of the two at 251 centimetres round and places its height in the 31 to 35 metre class, a rough figure but a tall one. It records no planting year, so we offer no age. Wingnuts grow fast and wide and throw up suckers, which is why old ones often look like a thicket of stems rather than one trunk.
Pterocarya fraxinifolia comes from the Caucasus and northern Iran. The leaves look like an ash's, long and divided, and in summer the tree hangs chains of winged fruit that give the genus its name. That is the thing to look for. The two trees stand about 25 metres apart, and the register treats them as one monument.
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · 300 years · Heiligenstadt (19th district)
At 6.5 metres around, this is a serious lime, and it stands in a small park in Heiligenstadt that most visitors to the city never reach. The city's tree cadastre lists it as a small-leaved lime with a recorded planting year of 1725 and a girth of 654 centimetres, and puts its height in the 21 to 25 metre class. If the year is close, the tree is roughly three hundred years old, which would make it older than the park around it by a wide margin.
Treat that date with care. A cadastre entry for a tree this age is an estimate recorded by the city's gardeners, not a planting document, and we found no second source for it, so the page carries the figure as a broad range rather than a fact. What does stand up is the trunk. A girth of 654 centimetres in a small-leaved lime is a serious tree, and the register protects it as a Natural Monument.
The park lies in Heiligenstadt, which is now part of Döbling. Two horse chestnuts stand within a few metres, planted in 1896 and 1961 according to the cadastre, so the lime is easy to tell from its neighbours by size alone. If you measure it, tell us what you get.
Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · 100 years · Döbling (19th district)
This copper beech was the last of four. On 8 February 2012 Vienna protected four trees in the Wertheimsteinpark on a single day, a lime, a Turkish hazel, a service tree and this one, Natural Monument 826, and together they make the park one of the few places in the city where you can collect a whole set in one short walk, all four within about two hundred metres.
The designation praised it for a splendid free-standing crown and for its vitality, which is the right emphasis. Nothing crowds it. The crown spreads about 16 metres, and the city's tree cadastre puts the height in the 21 to 25 metre class, so this is a tree built to be walked around rather than past.
The trunk measured 3.40 metres round at a metre above the ground when it was protected. The cadastre's own, later figure is 3.60 metres, so it has kept growing. The city estimated its age at about a hundred years in 2012, which puts it somewhere past a century and a decade now: an estimate, not a planting record, since the cadastre leaves the planting year blank.
Copper beeches open their leaves purple in spring and darken through summer. Come in October and the whole crown goes copper before it falls.
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · Döbling (19th district)
The city's own description calls this one of the mightiest planes in Vienna, and the numbers back it: 5.1 metres round the trunk, about 26 metres tall, a crown a good 25 metres across. It is Natural Monument 457, an oriental plane on the Max-Patat-Weg, the lane running off Döblinger Hauptstraße beside the Emil-Reich-Hof.
The complication is that it does not stand alone. The city's tree cadastre records three big old trees within thirty metres of the register's point: two planes, one 4.28 metres round and one 6.67 metres round, and a small-leaved lime. A second protected group, Natural Monument 620, a sycamore maple, a lime and another plane, stands about 25 metres away. So this corner of Döbling holds a small stand of veteran planes, and the register's coordinates do not settle which trunk carries number 457. The thickest of them, at 6.67 metres, is named as a monument by no source we have found.
Nobody has published an age for the protected tree, so we give none. What you can do is stand in the lane and look up at all of them. If you know which plane is number 457, or have a tape measure, tell us. The Wertheimsteinpark and its four monuments are about 300 metres away.
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · Währing / Döbling border (18th and 19th district)
Vienna protected this oak in July 1956, which makes it one of the older entries on a register that most of the city's trees joined decades later. It is Natural Monument 458, standing at the Peezgasse side of the Währinger Park, right on the line where the 18th district meets the 19th.
The two official descriptions of it do not quite agree, and that is worth knowing before you go. The monument list calls it a plain pedunculate oak, 2.9 metres round, 16 metres tall, with a crown 12 metres across. The city's tree cadastre, which records a tree two metres from the same point, calls it a columnar oak, the upright cultivar of the same species, and measures the trunk at 4.1 metres. It may be one tree measured at different times or in different ways, or two labels for the same trunk. We have not settled it. Standing in front of it, you may be able to: a columnar oak grows narrow and upright, a plain one spreads.
There is a second protected oak in this park, about 110 metres away, planted in 1923 when the park opened. This is not that one. Nobody has published a reliable age for number 458, so we give none. If you know it, or can tell us which shape the crown has, tell us.
Lombardy Poplar (Populus nigra 'Italica') · 130 years · Alsergrund (9th district)
Lombardy poplars are not supposed to get old. They grow fast, stand tall and narrow, and are known as a short-lived tree. The one in front of Franz-Josefs-Bahnhof was planted in 1892, according to the city's tree cadastre, which makes it roughly 130 years old and a genuine veteran of its kind.
It was not always alone. Vienna protected the poplars here as Natural Monument 644, and the monument list describes the group in the past tense: it consisted of three trees, and lastly of two. Today the register keeps a single point, and the cadastre a single Lombardy poplar standing exactly on it, 3.08 metres round and in the 16 to 20 metre height class.
The reason given for protecting them is unusual, and it explains why this tree matters more than its size suggests. The list cites the poplars' place in surroundings with almost no vegetation and their part in the look of the townscape. That is a legal order written not for a giant but for a landmark: a column of green on a paved square, in front of a railway station, where very little else grows.
So this is a tree to collect on the way somewhere. Trams stop on Julius-Tandler-Platz, two minutes away, and the station is right behind it. Look up before you go in.
White Poplar (Populus alba) · 125 years · Floridsdorf (21st district)
Two white poplars in a small Floridsdorf park were planted a year apart, in 1899 and 1900, and both are now well over four metres round. The city's tree cadastre records the first at 4.43 metres and the second at 4.15, and either figure is a very heavy trunk for a white poplar.
Vienna lists both in its natural monument register, as two separate entries about 55 metres apart in the Freiligrathpark. We have folded them into one stop, because you will want to see them together and the walk between them takes under a minute. Both fall in the cadastre's 16 to 20 metre height class. The planting years are the cadastre's own records for these two individual trees, which puts them at about 125 years old.
That is about all the paperwork says. Neither tree appears in the German Wikipedia list of Vienna's monuments with a matching address, and there is no published description of why they were protected. The most recent photograph we have found dates from 2016, though the cadastre that carries them is the city's current data.
The park is out in the north-east, across the Danube from the old town and on no walk with the other trees on this page. If you go, look for the silvery undersides of the leaves, which is how the species got its name, and tell us how they are doing.
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 180 years · Meidling (12th district)
This oak has its own boulder. Beside the trunk in Theodor-Körner-Park sits a stone with an inscription plaque, and the oak it refers to is known as the Theodor-Körner-Eiche. Vienna lists it as Natural Monument 847, and the monument list gives its reasons in three words: size, habit and vitality.
The size is easy to check. The city's tree cadastre measures the trunk at 4.3 metres round, and records a planting year of 1842. That is the cadastre's own entry for this tree rather than a dated document, so read it as a guide: somewhere between 150 and 200 years, with 1842 the likeliest. If it holds, the oak was a sapling while Meidling was still a separate village, and it has stood through the village becoming part of Vienna in 1892 and through two world wars.
One thing the paperwork does not say is why the oak carries the name it does, or when the stone was set beside it. It would be tidy to assume the tree was planted in somebody's honour, and no source we have found says so. The stone points at the tree; the tree came first, or at least nobody has shown otherwise.
It is a free walk in a public park with no opening hours. Go in leaf, when the crown that earned the protection is at its fullest. If you know the story of the stone, tell us.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 175 years · Leopoldstadt (2nd district)
The thickest tree in the Venediger-Au-Park was protected only in 2012, when it was already more than a century and a half old. Vienna made this London plane Natural Monument 781 that August, and the reason on the list is its role in the landscape: the park would look like a different place without it.
The trunk explains why. The city's tree cadastre puts it at 5.46 metres round, which is a very heavy plane by any city's standard, and records a planting year of 1849. That year is the cadastre's entry rather than a planting document, so we give it as a band, roughly 150 to 200 years. If 1849 is right, the plane went into the ground a year after the revolution of 1848 shook Vienna.
Since then it has outlasted a great deal of the Leopoldstadt around it. It was here when the Danube was straightened in the 1870s, and here while the district's Jewish community grew into one of the largest in Europe and was then destroyed in the 1930s and 1940s. The tree stood through all of it in what is now a small neighbourhood park, and for most of that time nobody wrote it down.
The other big trees here are a 1914 lime and a 1921 ash, both around three metres round. Next to them this one looks like it belongs to an older map, which it does.
Weeping Willow (Salix alba Tristis) · Liesing (23rd district), Atzgersdorf
Vienna protects plenty of trees for being old. This weeping willow in Atzgersdorf was protected for its character. It is Natural Monument 814, and the monument list says the reason plainly: it gives the Bruno-Morpurgo-Park its look.
It does that lopsidedly. The list describes an asymmetric crown about ten metres across and roughly twelve metres tall, the long hanging shoots falling further on one side than the other. When it was designated, the trunk measured 2.40 metres round at one metre up. The city's tree cadastre now records 3.05 metres. That is how willows behave: they put on girth fast, which is also why a thick willow is a poor guide to age.
So we do not give one. The cadastre carries a planting year, but nothing we have found shows it to be more than an estimate, and on a tree that grows this quickly a guess would be worse than nothing. What can be said is that weeping willows are not long-lived trees, and one large enough and shapely enough to be singled out by the city is worth a stop on its own terms.
It stands in a small public park on Endresstraße in the 23rd district, free and open. Come in early spring, when the curtain of shoots turns yellow-green before almost anything else around it has leafed. If you know when it was planted, tell us.
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · Hietzing (13th district)
Its crown is wider than it is tall. When Vienna listed this Caucasian wingnut as Natural Monument 816, the measurements came out at about 26 metres across and about 18 metres high, a tree spreading sideways over the end of a suburban street in Hietzing.
That shape is the whole reason it is protected. The monument list says the free-standing crown shapes the look of the place, and the place is unglamorous: the turning loop at the end of Wolkersbergenstraße, where it meets the Eugen-Jettel-Weg, in the small public Hugo-Pepper-Park. It is a tree that would not look out of place in a palace garden, standing where a road runs out.
Wingnuts come from the Caucasus and northern Iran and were planted in European parks from the nineteenth century, prized for exactly this habit of growing big, fast and wide. The trunk measured 4.10 metres round at one metre when it was designated; the city's tree cadastre now gives 4.27 metres and puts the height in the 21 to 25 metre class. No source we have found records when it was planted, so we give no age. If you know, tell us.
Come in early summer. That is when the wingnut hangs out the strings of winged seeds that give it its name, long green chains dangling all over that enormous crown.
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · Liesing (23rd district), Mauer
Vienna protected this lime for owning a street corner. The monument list says Natural Monument 813 dominates the crossing of Rielgasse and Kaserngasse in Mauer, and that is the job it still does from the corner of the Maurer Schubertpark.
The measurements are those of a broad, low tree rather than a tall one. At designation the trunk was 3.20 metres round at one metre up, the crown about 18 metres across and the height about 16 metres, so the crown is wider than the tree is high. The city's tree cadastre, which records it at exactly the register point, gives 3.04 metres and an 11 to 15 metre height class. The gap between the two girths is most likely a different measuring height or date, not a shrinking tree.
Mauer was a wine village on the southern edge of Vienna until it joined the city in 1938, and small-leaved limes like this one are the classic village tree of Central Europe, planted at crossings, churches and greens. Nobody has published a planting date for this one, so we give no age. If you know it, tell us.
Go at the end of June or in early July. Small-leaved limes flower then, and a crown this size fills the corner with the scent and the hum of bees.
European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) · Meidling (12th district), Hetzendorf
Vienna made this ash a natural monument on 3 May 1946, less than a year after the war ended, while the city was still divided between four occupying powers and short of almost everything, firewood included. It is Natural Monument 356, one of the older entries on the register, and the list says nothing at all about why.
The trunk is argument enough. The city's tree cadastre measures it at 4.58 metres round, with a height in the 21 to 25 metre class, which makes it a very large common ash. Ash trees that size have become rarer across Europe in the last twenty years, as ash dieback has killed them by the million, so a big, living one in a city park is worth seeking out.
It stands in the Parkanlage Münchenstraße in Hetzendorf, in the 12th district. The register files it under the address Werthenburggasse 9, which sounds like a front garden and is not: the city's cadastre places the tree inside the public park, one metre from the register point. Entry is free.
Nobody has published a planting date, so we give no age. If you know more, tell us, and if you visit, tell us how the crown looks.
Lombardy Poplar (Populus nigra 'Italica') · Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus (15th district)
Almost every Lombardy poplar you have ever seen is male. The columnar tree spread across Europe from cuttings, and female trees of it are rare, so rare in German-speaking countries that when Vienna found four old ones together in the Märzpark it protected the group in 1938 as Natural Monument 97.
The trunks were 1.50 to 2.10 metres round then. What stands there now is less certain, and we would rather say so. The register still keeps one point for the group. The city's tree cadastre records a Lombardy poplar three metres from that point, 3.46 metres round and in the 26 to 30 metre height class, with a planting year of 1911, which would make it well over a century old if the cadastre's year is right. That is a lot of growth since 1938, though plausible for a poplar, and we have not reconciled the two. Whether the other three of the four still stand, we have not been able to check.
That matters because Lombardy poplars are short-lived trees, and a group that has made it from 1938 into the present would be remarkable in itself. It is also why our pin marks the park rather than a trunk. Look for the tallest, narrowest trees in the Märzpark by the Vogelweidplatz; the one in the cadastre reaches somewhere near thirty metres.
If you go, count them, and tell us how many of the four are left.
Black Poplar (Populus nigra) · Freudenau, Leopoldstadt (2nd district)
The city's own tree inventory measures this black poplar at 5.95 metres round, and it stands on a harbour access road. The next big trees the inventory records beside it are two lindens, at 4.10 metres and 1.80.
Vienna made it Natural Monument 96 on 3 November 1938, eight months after the annexation by Nazi Germany. The stated reason was not the girth but the crown: it was protected "especially for its beautiful crown formation". Everything the city has been through since, it has stood through on this one spot in Freudenau.
That is also the worry. Black poplars are not long-lived trees, and a second protected black poplar nearby, at the Freudenauer Wasser, has already been removed at the end of its life. The newest photograph of this one we have found dates from 2014. What tells us it still stands is the inventory, which still carries a 5.95 metre black poplar within three metres of the monument's registered point.
Nobody has dated it, and the city's records give no planting year. If you know how old it is, tell us.
Be ready for an unglamorous walk: an industrial road through the port district, lorries and warehouses, and the tree on the street edge, seen from the pavement. It is worth it for the trunk alone. If you go, tell us how the crown is looking.
Black Poplar (Populus nigra) · Simmering (11th district)
This black poplar is a protected natural monument, and almost everything else about it is a blank.
The city's register lists a Schwarzpappel on Haidestraße in Simmering and, in the data we hold, gives it no number, no date and no reason. It is missing from the German Wikipedia list of Simmering's monuments, which is where we found the designation texts for most of Vienna's other protected trees. What we do have is the city's tree inventory, which records a black poplar 3.69 metres round at exactly the register's point.
That is a heavy trunk for the species, and still well short of the 5.95 metre black poplar on the Hafenzufahrtsstraße, about two kilometres to the north and also on this page. If you have an afternoon in the east of the city, the two make a pair.
We cannot tell you when this one was protected or how old it is, and we would rather say so than guess. Black poplars grow fast and do not live long, which makes a protected one in a working district worth seeing while it lasts. We have found no photograph of it at all; the inventory, which is current city data, is our evidence that it still stands.
It is a street tree, seen from the pavement. If you go, a photograph is the most useful thing you could send us, and if you know when or why the city protected it, tell us that too.
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · Oberlaa, Favoriten (10th district)
Vienna protects only a handful of Caucasian wingnuts, and this one stands not in a grand park but on a village square at the city's southern edge.
The others on the city's list are in better-known places: one in the Stadtpark, two in the Waldmüllerpark, and one 4.10 metres round on Wolkersbergenstraße. This one is on the Bischofplatz in Oberlaa, with a walnut a few metres to one side of it and a robinia to the other in the city's tree inventory.
That inventory gives its girth as 2.65 metres. Treat it as the city's figure rather than a clean measurement: wingnuts sucker freely and often grow as several stems, and we have not checked whether this is one trunk or a cluster.
The species is the reason to come. A tree of the Caucasus and northern Iran, it carries long leaves built like an oversized ash's and, in summer, hangs its crown with green chains of winged seeds, which is when it is easiest to pick out from across the square.
Nobody has dated it, and we have no photograph of it yet. About eighty metres away, on Hintere Liesingbachstraße, stands a protected horse chestnut, so Oberlaa gives you two natural monuments in one short stop. If you go, send us a picture, and tell us how many stems you count.
Poplar (Populus sp.; register says White Poplar, cadastre says Black Poplar) · Strebersdorf-Stammersdorf area, Floridsdorf (21st district)
Vienna's own records cannot agree what this tree is. The natural monument register calls it a white poplar; the city's tree inventory, at the same spot to within half a metre, calls it a black poplar. We have not settled it, so this page says poplar and leaves the question open.
What nobody disputes is its place in the street. The city protected it on 12 January 2004 as Natural Monument 788, and the reason given is about the neighbourhood rather than the tree: it "shapes the look of the local settlement". On Türkisgasse you can see what that means. The street is lined with lindens the inventory dates to 1980, and one poplar, about 28 metres tall at designation, stands over all of them.
The measurements disagree as well. At designation the trunk was 3.70 metres round and the crown about 12 metres across. The inventory now records 4.26 metres. Both figures come from the city, and we have not reconciled them.
Nobody has dated the tree, and the newest photograph we know of is from 2014. If you go, you can settle the argument in a minute: a white poplar's leaves are bright silvery white underneath, a black poplar's are green on both sides. Tell us which you see, and how the tree is doing.
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · Oberlaa, Favoriten (10th district)
This horse chestnut has grown twelve centimetres round the trunk since Vienna made it a monument, which is the best news we have about it.
The city protected it on 8 November 2007 as Natural Monument 808, "because of its free-standing crown and its effect on the townscape". The trunk was then 2.75 metres round, the tree about 18 metres tall and the crown about 10 metres across. The city's tree inventory now records 2.87 metres. A trunk that keeps thickening is a tree that is alive, and that matters for this species in Vienna, where horse chestnuts suffer from the leaf-miner moth, which browns their leaves by late summer, and from bleeding canker on the bark. We have not checked this one's health, and the newest photograph we know of dates from 2014.
It is not a giant. What it has is room: one crown standing clear on a street in Oberlaa, with nothing crowding it, which is exactly what the city chose to protect. Come in May, when it carries its white flower candles.
Nobody has dated it; if you know when it was planted, tell us. About eighty metres away, on the Bischofplatz, stands a protected Caucasian wingnut, so the two make one short stop. If you go, tell us how the leaves look.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · Grinzing, Doebling (19th district)
Vienna protected this plane in 1969 for a reason few trees are given: it shapes the look of its street.
That is the city's own wording for Natural Monument 473, listed on 18 March 1969 on Traklgasse in Grinzing, in front of numbers 11 and 13. It was then about 18 metres tall. The city's tree inventory now puts it in the 21 to 25 metre height class, with a trunk 3.25 metres round and a crown 10 to 12 metres across.
On a quiet residential street, that trunk is hard to miss. The other street trees on this stretch are lindens between 0.86 and 1.57 metres round, so the plane carries roughly twice the girth of the biggest of them.
It is not the only protected plane here. About 40 metres away, at Traklgasse 9, stands Natural Monument 560, a second plane, listed in 1973 with a trunk then 2.23 metres round. The two make one short stop.
One loose end in the paperwork: the published list of Döbling's monuments also names a Lombardy poplar under number 473. The city's register point holds a single tree, and it is this plane.
The newest photographs we know of date from July 2012, though the inventory still carries the tree. Nobody has dated it either. If you walk past, tell us how it looks, and if you know when it was planted, tell us that too.
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · Grinzing, Doebling (19th district)
This oak's crown spreads about 20 metres, roughly as wide as the tree is tall.
The city's tree inventory puts the crown in the 19 to 21 metre class and the height at 16 to 20 metres, on a trunk 2.90 metres round. That is an unusually broad spread for a trunk of that size, and the oak has the room to show it: it is the only tree within about 15 metres, standing beside the road at Strassergasse 2 in Grinzing.
Vienna made it Natural Monument 671 on 2 May 1979 and wrote down three reasons: its size, the form of its crown, and its standing as a historic remnant of the Grinzing village scene. A city does not often protect a tree for the street it belongs to as much as for the tree itself. This one got both.
Walk 80 to 100 metres north up the same street and you reach three more protected trees at Strassergasse 8 to 12, a yew, a giant sequoia and a Nordmann fir, all listed in 1941. A broadleaf oak and a Californian conifer within a short stroll of each other make an odd and pleasing pair.
Nobody has dated the oak. The newest dated photographs we know of were taken in July 2012, and the city's inventory still carries it. If you pass, tell us how it looks, and if you know when it was planted, tell us that too.