The Most Remarkable Trees in the World

19 places in 12 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 General Sherman

   United States36.582° N 118.751° W

   

   General Sherman is a giant sequoia in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park, and by volume it is the largest known living single-stem tree on Earth. The trunk holds an estimated 1,487 cubic metres of wood; the tree stands 83.8 m tall, measures about 31 m around at the ground, and its first large branch springs out roughly 40 m above the base. It is not the tallest tree (a coast redwood holds that record), nor the widest, nor the oldest, but no other living tree combines height and girth on this scale. Its age is estimated at 2,300 to 2,700 years.

   Did you know? The trunk alone weighs close to 1,400 tons by the park service's estimate, roughly as much as fifteen adult blue whales.

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2. 02 Icod Dragon Tree

   Spain28.367° N 16.722° W

   

   Dragon trees look like something from another geological age. Dracaena draco is native to the Canary Islands, where it has become a living emblem of the archipelago. The most famous individual of the species stands in Icod de los Vinos on the north coast of Tenerife. El Drago Milenario, the "thousand-year-old dragon", rises about 20 metres, with a trunk roughly 20 metres around at the base and a crown of more than three hundred main branches that fork again and again into rosettes of stiff blue-green leaves.

   Did you know? Botanically the dragon tree is not a true tree but a giant woody monocot, which is why its trunk has no annual rings.

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3. 03 Hundred-Horse Chestnut

   Castagno dei Cento Cavalli

   Italy · 28 km from Catania37.749° N 15.132° E

   

   On the eastern slopes of Mount Etna, in the village of Sant'Alfio, stands what is believed to be one of the oldest and largest trees in Europe: the Hundred-Horse Chestnut (Castagno dei Cento Cavalli), a sweet chestnut whose age botanists estimate at between 2,000 and 4,000 years. The Turin botanist Bruno Peyronel suggested that it could be three to four thousand years old, which would make it the oldest tree on the continent.

   Did you know? It is considered the largest and oldest known sweet chestnut anywhere in the world.

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4. 04 Tane Mahuta

   New Zealand35.601° S 173.527° E

   

   Deep in the Waipoua Forest on New Zealand's Northland peninsula stands the largest kauri known to be alive. Tāne Mahuta – named after Tāne, the Māori god of forests and birds – is not the tallest tree in the world, but few living things carry such bulk. Its grey, column-like trunk rises almost 18 metres without a single branch and is more than 15 metres around; above it, a crown of twisted limbs spreads out to a total height of about 45 metres. Measurements taken in 2002 put the timber in the trunk alone at some 255 cubic metres.

   Did you know? Including its crown, the tree's total volume was measured in 2002 at about 517 cubic metres, roughly double that of its trunk alone.

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5. 05 Árbol del Tule

   Mexico · 5.4 km from Oaxaca de Juárez17.047° N 96.636° W

   

   El Árbol del Tule is a Montezuma cypress — an ahuehuete, "old man of the water" in Nahuatl — growing in the churchyard of Santa María del Tule, a small town in the valley of Oaxaca. It has the stoutest trunk of any tree known: in 2005 its girth measured 42 metres, and even after allowing for the deep buttresses and folds of the bark, its smoothed-out diameter of about 9.4 metres is wider than that of the largest giant sequoia. The crown is so broad that its height is hard to measure; a laser survey in 2005 gave 35.4 metres. It was once thought to be several trees grown together, but DNA tests showed it to be a single individual.

   Did you know? The tree was on UNESCO's tentative list of World Heritage Sites from 2001 until it was removed in 2013.

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6. 06 Grizzly Giant

   United States37.504° N 119.601° W

   

   The Grizzly Giant is the tree people picture when they think of Yosemite's sequoias. It stands in the Mariposa Grove, the park's largest grove of giant sequoias, and it is not the tallest or the most voluminous of its kind — it ranked 26th among living giant sequoias by volume in 1990 — but its presence is unforgettable: a massive, fire-scarred trunk about 64 metres tall, nearly 30 metres around at the ground and almost 8 metres across a little above its base, holding some 960 cubic metres of wood.

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7. 07 Dark Hedges

   United Kingdom55.134° N 6.381° W

   

   Around 1775 James Stuart set out a double row of beech trees along the approach to Gracehill House, the house he had built in the north of County Antrim and named after his wife, Grace Lynd. The idea was simple estate theatre: a grand avenue to impress anyone driving up to the gate. Some two and a half centuries later the planting has become something its maker could not have designed — a tunnel of grey, contorted trunks whose crowns have met and knotted over Bregagh Road, the lane between the villages of Armoy and Stranocum.

   Did you know? Wood from two beeches felled by Storm Gertrude in 2016 became ten carved doors, one per episode of Game of Thrones season six, hung in Northern Irish pubs.

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8. 08 Lone Cypress

   United States · 7.3 km from Monterey36.569° N 121.965° W

   

   On a granite outcrop above the surf at Pebble Beach, a single Monterey cypress leans out over the Pacific with nothing around it but rock, spray and sky. The Lone Cypress is among the most photographed trees in the United States, and its appeal is purely one of composition: a dark, windswept crown balanced on a bare knuckle of stone, framed by the blue of Carmel Bay and the white water breaking below.

   Did you know? The earliest known paintings and photographs of the tree, from the 1880s, show a full dome-shaped crown quite unlike today's wind-carved silhouette.

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9. 09 Avenue of the Baobabs

   Madagascar · 14.6 km from Morondava20.251° S 44.418° E

   

   A short stretch of road in western Madagascar holds one of the strangest and most photographed tree groups on earth. On either side of the track stand Grandidier's baobabs, Adansonia grandidieri, a species found only on the island: smooth, column-straight trunks rising to around 30 metres and ending abruptly in a small tuft of branches, as if the trees had been planted upside down. The avenue proper is only about 260 metres long, with some twenty to twenty-five giants lining the road and more scattered in the fields nearby. In Malagasy the tree is called renala, usually translated as "mother of the forest".

   Did you know? About 25 more baobabs stand in the rice paddies and meadows around the avenue, and the protected site covers roughly four hectares.

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10. 10 General Grant Tree

    General Grant

    United States36.748° N 118.971° W

    

    The General Grant Tree is a giant sequoia in Kings Canyon National Park, high on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada in California, and it is one of the largest living things on Earth. It is about 81.5 metres (267 feet) tall and nearly 33 metres around at the base, and by volume of trunk it ranks as the second-largest tree in the world. Its age is estimated at around 1,650 years, younger than older estimates of over two thousand, but still reaching back to the late Roman world.

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11. 11 Jōmon Sugi

    Japan30.361° N 130.532° E

    

    Jōmon Sugi is the elder of the cedar forests of Yakushima, a gnarled giant of Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria japonica) standing at around 1,300 metres on the northern flank of Mount Miyanoura, deep in the island's mountainous interior. It is not especially tall, about 25 to 30 metres depending on the measurement, but its girth is prodigious: the trunk measures some 16.4 metres around, and with a timber volume estimated at about 300 cubic metres it is counted as the largest conifer in Japan. What holds the eye is its shape rather than its size, a massive, knotted, undulating column that looks more like a rock formation than a tree.

    Did you know? When first described in 1966, the tree was called Ōiwa-sugi, the Great Rock Cedar, before the name Jōmon Sugi took hold.

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12. 12 Angel Oak

    United States32.718° N 80.079° W

    

    The Angel Oak is a southern live oak growing on Johns Island, in the Lowcountry just south-west of Charleston, and it is less a tree than a small landscape. The trunk is about 8.5 metres around, but the height, some twenty metres, is modest; what overwhelms is the spread. Its limbs, heavy as trunks themselves, reach out horizontally in every direction, dip to the ground, rest on it and rise again, so that the crown shades roughly 1,600 square metres. The longest branch runs for about 57 metres. It is a living example of how a live oak, given open ground and centuries, grows out rather than up.

    Did you know? In May 2026 the Angel Oak was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the first tree in South Carolina to receive that recognition.

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13. 13 Cashew Tree of Pirangi

    Brazil · 25 km from Natal5.974° S 35.129° W

    

    The cashew tree of Pirangi looks less like a single tree than a small forest. It grows at Pirangi do Norte, a beach settlement in the municipality of Parnamirim, about 12 km south of Natal in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Norte, and its canopy covers somewhere between 7,300 and 8,500 m², roughly the space of seventy ordinary cashew trees, with a perimeter of around 500 metres.

    Did you know? Of the five main limbs, the only one that grew normally stopped when it reached the ground, and locals nicknamed it Salário Mínimo, the minimum wage.

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14. 14 Chêne d'Allouville

    France · 34.6 km from Rouen49.596° N 0.676° E

    

    In the middle of Allouville-Bellefosse, a farming village of the Pays de Caux, an oak stands opposite the porch-tower of the church of Saint-Quentin and has been turned, quite literally, into a church of its own. The trunk is completely hollow and roughly conical, and inside it are two tiny chapels stacked one above the other. Estimates put the tree's age at around 1,200 years, which would make it a contemporary of Charlemagne; a local story insists it was planted in 911, the year Normandy was founded, but that is tradition rather than record.

    Did you know? It is regarded as the oldest known oak in France and one of the oldest in Europe, a pedunculate oak that still produces leaves and acorns.

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15. 15 Miharu Takizakura

    Japan · 10.7 km from Kōriyama37.408° N 140.500° E

    

    For a week or so each April, a single tree on a gentle rise outside the town of Miharu turns into a cascade of pale pink. Its name says exactly that: Takizakura means "waterfall cherry", and the image is apt. This is a weeping higan cherry, a variety whose long, slender branches hang almost vertically, so when the blossom opens the whole crown seems to pour towards the ground in thousands of thin streams.

    Did you know? In 2008–09 seeds from the tree spent about eight and a half months aboard Kibo, the Japanese module of the International Space Station.

    More about Miharu Takizakura →

16. 16 The Great Banyan

    India · 4.2 km from Howrah22.561° N 88.287° E

    

    The Great Banyan of Howrah is a single tree that looks like a forest. It grows in the Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden at Shibpur, across the Hooghly from Kolkata, and is believed to be at least 250 years old. A banyan (Ficus benghalensis) sends aerial roots down from its branches; when they reach the ground they thicken into new trunks, and over centuries this tree has spread into a grove of about 3,700 prop roots covering some 1.9 hectares.

    Did you know? The original trunk, removed in 1925, is said to have measured about 15 metres across; a marker stone now stands where it grew.

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17. 17 Cedar Avenue of Nikkō

    Japan · 25 km from Utsunomiya36.723° N 139.691° E

    

    For more than 35 kilometres, the old roads into Nikkō run between walls of giant Japanese cedars, their straight red-brown trunks rising like columns on either side. The Cedar Avenue of Nikkō is the popular name for three tree-lined roads, the Nikkō Kaidō, the Nikkō Reiheishi Kaidō and the Aizu Nishi Kaidō, which converge on the shrines and temples of Nikkō. Together they are lined by roughly 12,500 to 13,000 cryptomeria trees, many of them close to 400 years old. The 1996 Guinness Book of World Records listed the avenue as the longest tree-lined road in the world, and it is the only property in Japan designated both a Special Historic Site and a Special Natural Monument.

    Did you know? The trees are owned not by the state but by Nikkō Tōshō-gū shrine, to which Matsudaira Masatsuna dedicated them in 1648.

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18. 18 That Wānaka Tree

    New Zealand · 2.2 km from Wanaka44.698° S 169.117° E

    

    It began life as a fence post. Sometime before 1939 a length of crack willow was driven into the shallows of Roys Bay, at the southern end of Lake Wānaka, to stop livestock from the neighbouring Wānaka Station wandering along the shore. The fence has long gone; the post took root, sprouted, and grew into a single leaning tree standing a few metres out in the water, alone against the lake and the mountains behind it.

    Did you know? The tree is a crack willow, a species brought to New Zealand from Europe, whose cut branches root so easily that a fence post could come alive.

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19. 19 Baines’ Baobabs

    Baines Baobabs

    Botswana20.112° S 24.769° E

    

    Seven baobabs stand together on a low island of ground at the edge of Kudiakam Pan, a dry salt pan in Botswana's Nxai Pan National Park. Around them the land is flat to the horizon. The trees are enormous, more than 20 metres tall, with the swollen grey trunks and bare, root-like crowns that make baobabs look as if they had been planted upside down. They are thought to be around a thousand years old, and in that empty country they read from far off like a landmark built on purpose.

    Did you know? Baines and James Chapman travelled from Walvis Bay on the Atlantic coast to Lake Ngami and the Victoria Falls in 1861–1862, passing the trees on the way.

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