tell me about your favourite trees

Species or specific individual trees are all welcome.

I walked by my personal fave species the other day — the smoke tree, which looks stunning and fantastical in spring, summer, and autumn — which made me wonder what trees people feel attached to.

I like Japanese maple trees; maples in general are a treat, esp now I live in southern Quebec. There's an impressively large sumac tree in the backyard behind my place that is nice to watch through the seasons. I've been enjoying gingkos' yellow leaves this fall.

When I lived in Chicago, I really liked catalpas with their long seed pods and chestnut trees when they flowered. I miss a lot of the evergreens we'd get in Oregon. As much as I love deciduous trees and understand wanting to maximize sunshine in the winter, I wish there was more green in the Montreal winter.

Primary tree of childhood: the weeping willows in our backyard that we would climb and try to swing on their branches.

We have massive weeping cherry trees on our property and they're absolutely gorgeous around early April with their blossoms. once a strong breeze goes through we have this blossom snow storm. and the firewood we get from it smells incredible.

I like a lot of trees but my heart lifts whenever I see a coastal redwood (sequoia sempervirens)

growing up in Northern California, they are our trees and I just like to have one in sight... love the smell in summer, and thinking about the hundreds of years they've lived through, the storms, the floods, etc. The groves are eerily silent

They are also the perfect tree to shelter beneath when drinking a beer in the rain, as you'll stay pretty dry... I do this often

#2 is probably oak, or something like quaking aspen

Oh yeah flowering fruit trees are the best! Oregon was the first time I started to realize the differences among cherry, apple, plum, and pear trees (though I could have gained this knowledge in Illinois). I haven't experienced the firewood thing though, that sounds great, what is the smell like?

We had a couple redwoods in our backyard in Oregon, totally crazy moving there from Chicago. Oak savannas in Oregon & CA are one of my fave ecosystems

on the individual tree tip, my partner used to live right near the (oak) tree that owns itself: https://www.visitathensga.com/things-to-do/attractions/the-tree-that-owns-itself/

Plane trees

Excellent post. I've been wondering what those trees with the multicoloured bark are called, thanks treeship! I saw some great specimens in Paris a month ago

I love a willow, particularly draping into a pond or lake.

Would love to see a sequoia in the flesh one day.

I’m into male ginkgos. Our street is lined with them and they look nice and don’t smell bad like the females often do after pollination.

Oh, I should've added above ^^^^: olive trees are really cool as well, the older and gnarlier the better, under brilliant blazing sunshine

I live in an ecosystem full of conifers, so they dominate my list.

Top of the list: old growth mountain hemlocks. Anywhere I find them I am certain to be in a magnificent place and they are an integral part of that magnificence.

Below that, in no particular order: ponderosa pines, western red cedars, old growth douglas fir, subalpine larches, and whitebark pines. I associate all these trees with my favorite places. When I am among them, I am almost certain to be happy and at peace.

good collection, that

This time of year: Japanese maples when they get intensely red.

the vacant lot outside my kitchen window - that I'm looking at now - has been overrun with invasive black acacias, an australian tree as far as I know. Yes, they're bad and invasive but it's really thickly wooded, there are squirrels and blue jays hiding in the branches... it reminds me of Where the Wild Things Are so I've grown to appreciate them somewhat

To give an idea of what I mean by 'old growth' mountain hemlock (from wikipedia):

Mountain hemlock is usually found on cold, snowy subalpine sites where it grows slowly, sometimes attaining more than 800 years in age.

I kinda wanna see that Train Dreams movie

oh i adore this thread and all the posts therein.

my personal favorite is populus fremontii or the fremont cottonwood, found in the colorado plateau into the southwest and mexico. and california! it likes the banks of creeks and washes. occasionally you see a lone cottonwood somewhere out in a brush valley. usually a sign of water of some kind. they have wild, unpredictable shapes. they can be really majestic and well-proportioned or squirrelly and impossibly angular.

another favorite is the roundly maligned russian olive. maligned because it's considered invasive and a water hog. but the smell in june when they blossom is unmistakeable and so, so sweet.

up there with both of those is the Canyon maple. from a utah state university forestry page: "Canyon maple is a native of moist, mountainous sites from southeastern Idaho, throughout Utah, western Colorado, portions of Arizona and New Mexico, and scattered locations in northern Mexico, southwestern Texas, and western Oklahoma. It is especially common in Utah's Wasatch mountains, where it grows at elevations from 4,500 to 7,500 feet. It tends to grow on lower slopes and canyon bottoms in the mountains in association with Douglas-fir and junipers, but below aspen and subalpine fir."

in the fall the canyon maples are usually the first thing to light up on the mountainside. orange and brown trending toward a bright, pure red. they pop no matter how much water or lack of water we've had. they're usually a smaller tree, almost shrub-like.

oh i can't not mention pinon and juniper. and second the stunning ponderosa pine, which extends up into southern utah.

oh oh and: bristlecone pines! a hike to a bristlecone pine forest is a very special treat indeed. they move me to tears.

always takes me a second when people mention hemlock the tree because my mind automatocally goes to the totally different herbaceous plant that was famously used to poison socrates

for those not aware of the bristlecone pine: "The oldest of this species is more than 4,800 years old,[1] making it the oldest known individual of any species. " they grow in quite a few places at very high elevations in great basin rangeland. tend to be hard to get to. the one relatively accessible hike and forest i've done is in great basin national park. very remote and spacious area surrounded by wilderness. i think the oldest one is in the white mountains in california. left unmarked and not documented publicly for obvious reasons.

they are impossibly beautiful

oh oh and: bristlecone pines!

I have a framed photo in my kitchen of a small bristlecone, maybe about three feet tall, and it completely looks like what a great bonsai tree looks like: gnarled, stunted, barely clinging to the rock. I didn't know what kind of tree it was when I took the pic but an arborist buddy confirmed it's a bristlecone

burning pinon logs is a very fine experience. wonderful fire wood.

I had to look bristlecones and fremont cottonwoods up, but both are fantastic choices!

I'm not really a spiritual person, but really old trees & old forests definitely have a presence. Maybe just trees in general really, I certainly had a deep relationship with trees when I was a kid. I started this thread mostly because I regret not getting out to the woods this fall before winter kicked in.

xp only naturally dead wood of course! i'm the kind of person who gets mad if, say, a school chops down an aged willow on its grounds because ... why? there is never a good reason to do that afaic.

oh definitely. trees and all plants are sentient beings. because of their age, i think, trees have a special relationship to human beings, and the scale of what they provide, what they provide specifically to our species.

I was out on a wet & windy walk yesterday: lots of coastal oaks, giant eucalyptus, monterey cypress, douglas fir, bay laurel and some redwoods... pretty classic assortment of NorCal trees

the smell of the first eucalyptus forest I went to is a sweet memory (near SLO)

i love an ancient oak woodland, me and colonel poo visited a great one last year that was full of some huge gnarly specimens including 'the king of limbs' (which was where radiohead got that album title from obv). lots of the other oak trees were named too - 'the goblin oak' (cos it had a face ...like a goblin!), two big fat ones called 'young paunchy' and 'old paunchy' which are absolutely fire rapper names there for the taking imo, and my favourite, 'the exploded oak', a deceased giant whose outsized branches had been strewn all around in a vast circle due to some mysterious cataclysmic arboreal event. place was buzzing with life - oaks support the highest amount of biodiversity out of all UK trees by quite some margin, and for a forest it was really light and airy due to the way they grow (they get massive and then eventually die and leave big gaps) . even some freerange cows were roaming around in the woods munching on things, birds darting through the branches, signs up about the wild boar which of course we didn't see, probably more than a few hedgehogs nestled among the piles of dead leaves

xp there's some very questionable 19th century photos of some giant eucalyptus trees in australia that were supposed to be over 500 feet tall (the tallest CA redwood tree is less than 400 feet).. but there's nothing in the foreground to really judge the height. They do, however, get very tall.. over 300 feet

i do quite often have to climb trees in order to prune them at work, so i'd also like to give well-kept old apple trees a shout out for being one of the best things to scramble about in. anything with thorns can get to fuck though

Someone once asked me what I'd miss most when I finally checked out, and I instinctively answered 'trees'. I was going to say I'm at my happiest when I'm out and around trees, but it's not that; it's closer to a simple stative verb of being.

This time of year, I love yellowing maples and silver birches, stands of beeches. Affinity wise, it'd probably be yews, though. I've had some weird experiences in yew chases. Those pink arboreal folds contain mysteries.

yews are great.. super poisonous though, aren't they?

apparently the flesh of the fruit isn't poisonous, but the seed inside it is, as are all other parts of the tree

lots of folklore around yews, sacred tree for the druids too

i'll admit i am jealous of the rich (and huge!) tree experiences that californians and the northwest coasters get to experience on the daily. i loved reading about that ancient oak woodland nickb!

I like:

- Norfolk Island pine: soothing foliage texture. I tried to keep one as a houseplant for a while and failed.
- Cedar: mmm the smell
- Mangroves: they're just really cool
- Acers (sycamores, maples, etc): unbeatable autumn colours
- White birch: lovely papery bark
- Weeping willow or a big old oak: so elegant!
- Ficus: impressively thick, sprawling trunks and roots
- Cherries: joyful spring blooms (and gothiness of the varieties with red/black leaves)
- Coconut and date palms: sunny vacation vibes
- North American spruces and firs of any variety really: hominess, childhood winters, trips to the rockies

A tree I've never seen IRL but would like to someday is a swampy bald cypress.

i think the only trees that i remember climbing as a young person were cottonwoods - they could be kind of treacherous though. i believe they were narrowleafs, a slightly different variety in north and western utah where i grew up.

i should also mention aspens. nothing compares to the sound of the wind shaking their leaves on a quiet day in the mountains. the sound of wind through an evergreen forest is also remarkable.

we were in boulder, colorado over the weekend. lots of ponderosa in the foothills there, though they seemed relatively short. ponderosa in my mind are red-barked giants in southern utah and arizona, but they're all over the western americas! you just don't find them in the wasatch mountains around where i live.

Although I don't love them aesthetically, I want to give a shout-out to the monkey puzzle tree (araucaria) - I have surprisingly strong memories of learning about them while visiting a country park with my mum, and being impressed by how difficult it would be to climb its long branchless trunk.

In the 1800s there was a huge vinegar works in Worcester, big enough to have its own branch line on the railway, and one of the owners used the money he made (or rather his dad made) to buy up a huge amount of land and build a mansion just over the border with Herefordshire. Then about a century later in the late 1970s, his descendants could no longer afford the upkeep, so sold the building to a group of families who set up a commune there - not one based on anything religious or political, just a load of people mucking in together, and that's where I grew up. At the front (actually the side but the front as far as I was concerned) there was the most massive redwood pine tree you have ever seen, significantly taller than the building itself and stood all alone on the top of the hill. Not sure what species of redwood it was, but it was wide as well as being tall. From all of the windows of our flat it just kind of loomed at you, taking up a good part of the view, if it had fallen then we would have been at risk I guess. It was just this central part of my psychic geography, the point from which I measured everything, not something I ever actively think about of course, just there. I used to pick up fallen needles and put them in the fire, the oil would pop and fizzle and smell amazing. Otherwise I had no interactions with the thing, we would climb other trees but there was absolutely no way up to the first branches of the monster.

Then when we went to visit a few years ago, it was suddenly gone, only a (massive obvs) stump was left. We were told that it had died and had to be removed before it fell, which is fair enough, but it feels so odd to be there with this gap in the sky, and stranger to think that my kids (who had never been there before) would find the view perfectly normal.

Not sure what species of redwood it was, but it was wide as well as being tall.

It could have been a sequoia. They're somewhat chubbier than redwoods.

I think there are only three species of redwoods? the tall ones, the fat ones, and then the rarer 'dawn redwoods'

There's a Chinese elm nearby (at least that's what the Seek app identified it as) that's really unusual for the area, and gorgeous.

I grew up in Minnesota, am now in California, and miss living near deciduous forests. There is a eucalyptus forest in SF I love to hike through but I have mixed feelings about the eucalyptus - invasive, water-hungry, etc.

Redwoods classic obv.

I love a hornbeam. Hardest wood of any European tree and probably the most beautiful shape - with and without leaves.

Although I don't love them aesthetically, I want to give a shout-out to the monkey puzzle tree (araucaria) - I have surprisingly strong memories of learning about them while visiting a country park with my mum, and being impressed by how difficult it would be to climb its long branchless trunk.

oh yeah monkey puzzles, arboreal version of hostile architecture

My wife is scared of monkey puzzle trees, she thinks they look like centipedes.

great posts everyone, I've been enjoying looking up trees (hornbeam very cool, fabulous witchy aura). I think I'll try to walk through a park later instead of taking the metro

When I was growing up in Florida we had two massive ficus trees in our back yard. These were beautiful, elegant, and great for climbing. Around town there were also huge banyan trees, of the same genus, that were even grander. And I loved all the coconut palms and royal palms that proliferated in the area, although these are not actual trees, it turns out.

A lot of San Francisco street trees are ficus and they have a bad habit of dropping giant limbs onto people's cars... I think they're no longer planting them

seeing more ginko (STINKO!) trees being planted as city trees, in parking lots and places... man, the ones with the yellow fruits are smelly and gross

Want to give a shout out to the lovely lemon tree in our yard that produces wonderful fruit. I talk to it to give thanks for its lemons.

In case magnolias were missed in the posts above, I love the ones that are tall and fully leafed out. My grandfather had a spectacular one at his home in Virginia.

speaking of magnolias... in case you needed another reason to despise someone

Trump’s White House Ballroom Construction Project Tears Down Historic Magnolia Trees

The trees commemorated Presidents Warren G. Harding and Franklin D. Roosevelt

I was trying to remember what trees I liked in Georgia and magnolias are pretty high up. Spanish moss on oaks also extremely cool.

Citrus trees might be the only reason I would consider living in California

citrus trees are kinda weird in that they mostly fruit in the winter

I steal lemons and oranges from a neighbor down the street. He also has a pomelo tree but I have no idea what to do with those, they're as big as bowling balls

My grandmother who lived in Socal had a tangerine tree in her backyard. We normally visited around Christmas and fresh tangerines off the tree were an important part of the experience. One year we visited a different time of year, I ran back to the tree and ... nothing. I came back to the house disappointed and my grandmother thought this was hilarious "did you think it had fruit all year round? hahahahahaha"

I remember thinking more or less "that's how you want to play it, huh? I see how it is, grandma ..."

I sneaked out to play hookey today because a tree crew was removing the 30 ft black acacia right outside my kitchen window (five feet away), and I didn't want to be here for it. It's not an especially glamorous tree but was popular with squirrels and blue jays, and I've grown very used to it. I'm not entirely sure why it was removed, it was very healthy.. my guess is that the owner want to create a fire buffer

I went to the bar for an hour and when I returned, the crew was gone, and the tree was gone. RIP buddy

Trees and thoughts about them

1. Crape myrtle, beautiful when in bloom and when turning.

2. Mimosa because they're so extra, the Auntie Mame of trees.

3. Black walnut. Stainy stinky fruit and all. Badass. Deal with it.

4. Japanese maple, when reddish and lacy and inscrutable. I would let it tell me to paint a fence, wax a car, etc.

5. Golden rain because what the actual fuck with those sci-fi-ass seed pods.

6. Cedar, with its smell of gin and fancy closet deodorizers. I have one with a bench under it and it just wants to create a contemplative zen glade. The Japanese Garden at Maymont in Richmond Va. Has a glade of cedar so cool and hidden that it feels like a fairy tale setting.

7. The pine in my side yard that fell down in a rainstorm ten years ago, precisely onto my neighbor's yard (after missing their bedroom by inches). I don't like the neighbors so I was glad it was their problem, but also glad I didn't have to pretend I was sorry about smashing their house.

8. An enormous willow oak right next to the above ex-pime. Tallest tree in the surrounding neighborhood by a significant margin. Dwarfs the houses easily. When it falls, it really will crush the neighbors' house, and I will have to be helpful and nice to them. Sigh.

9. A saucer magnolia next to my childhood home. Also tallest in its neighborhood. I spent about 14.6% of my boyhood up in it. When local boys played army, the magnolia seed pods became grenades. The tree is still there but we don't own the house any more so I don't think they'll let me up in it.

10. Mulberry. Next to the magnolia above. My mother hung laundry out; when the mulberries were ripe, birds would eat the berries and then poop on the laundry - we had bedsheets with purple streaks. Every few years we made a pie with the berries.

11. I was born in the Misspuri and grew up in Virginia. At age 30 or so I went to the west coast for the first time. After decades of outdoorsiness, hiking, camping, I thought I had a handle on what trees are and the range of what is possible, tree-wise. Nope. Pretty much every tree in Oregon was taller than any tree I'd ever seen.

Not that height is everything. Just sayin.

#2 is probably oak, or something like quaking aspen

― Andy the Grasshopper, Monday, November 17, 2025 1:22 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

here’s a thread i can get into. lemme just say, to begin with, i think trees are people, full stop. non-human persons. idgaf if you think that’s flaky.

one of my favorite people is a quaking aspen who lives on the ramapo-dunderberg trail in harriman state park. my feeling about quaking aspen in general, they’re neurotic as hell. The Tree With Perpetual Nervousness. the leaves shudder and tremble, why they’re called that. one thing that’s really wild: a colony of quaking aspen, they’re all interconnected at the roots. so even though the individual trunks are very fragile and vulnerable the root network underneath might be unfathomably ancient, like thousands of years old. anyway the particular quaking aspen trunk i’m thinking of, when we first “met” there had recently been a huge brush fire and the quaking aspen was one of the few survivors. that’s some deep trauma! it was surrounded by a burned out wood, just total devastation. my friend and i took an hour to sit and grieve with the tree, horrified, in total silence. it was very unsettling, and we took a little piece of bark and made a tincture that tasted harshly bitter. you’d taste it and convulse, like the tree itself. shake rattle & roll, which is a very cathartic way to deal with your own terror. shake it off. and i always associate that particular tree with the condition of being twinned with your neighbors, so closely connected that you feel all their pain, and the vulnerability of codepenence. i always stop and hang out when i do that hike, which is very rare now. give it a cuddle, try to offer some protection or reassurance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/2012-10-18_P1010312_View_south_towards_Big_Bald_Mountain_from_White_Pine_County_Route_6_ascending_Overland_Pass_from_the_east.JPG

in pinon-juniper woodlands, the two trees are like siblings who look very much alike from a distance but grow increasingly distinct the closer you look, multiplied over huge areas in the southwest. there is a conspicuously large juniper and pinon next to each other about a mile into a trail that traverses the sandstone uplift of the klondike bluffs near arches national park. the trail is almost all on navajo sandstone. i would make it up there about once every two weeks when i lived in moab, 30 miles to the south. i've run that particular trail maybe 50 times. the trees stand there like guardians at the end of a slow descent into a smooth, shallow ravine. they're around 30 feet tall. when i see them, they welcome me like old friends.

if you're attentive you can often find balls of hardened juniper sap collecting along the seams of the fibrous bark, or on the ground in their beds of needles, next to scatterings of aquamarine juniper berries as bright as stars if it's late in the fall. the sap balls soften under the warmth of your fingers and the smell is .. a thousand kinds of clean. the sap was used by native tribes in the area as medicine. when you run past the junipers, you can occasionally smell them breathing, a momentary bottomless presence. there is a bird, the pinon jay, closely tied to the pinons. they have a loud screech. we were camping in a woodland one time and the loud thunk of pinecones dropping on the roof of the tent as the jays cleared them of their seeds in the afternoon was amusing, startling and relentless.

i think trees are people, full stop. non-human persons.

you'll get no argument from me on that. trees have just as much individuality and character as humans, they're just quieter as they go about it.

It's verging on cliché for someone from my region to say it, but sub-alpine forests of Eucalyptus regnans rarely fail to impress me regardless. Massive parallel vertical trunks, with the canopy perhaps 100 metres above your head. For full points you need dense ferns in soggy earth at ground level, with a lyrebird or similar foraging amongst the leaves, preferably with a light mist and a chill to the air lol.

i see other woodlands that i'm not familiar with, usually in train ride videos in, say, brazil or australia, and they look so mysterious and alluring and alien. i should make a travel list comprised not of cities but of woodland ecosystems to visit.

all the places i wanna visit are nature preserves and wilderness areas, i can’t think of anywhere i want to travel that’s a city tbh.. padua maybe? To see the Giotto chapel. when i took art history i thought the Italians painted trees very strangely. Then i went there and the umbrella pines really look like that. There’s even a celebrity umbrella pine in Ravello on the Amalfi coast, it is said to be the most photographed tree in Italy.

That sounds like a lovely idea map! When i was a child i always wished that our forests and cities were fused somehow, all our lives were under the shade of a dense lush canopy far above our heads, people would live inside vast tree trunks and these dwellings would be many floors high, you could visit your neighbours by walking across thick interconnected braches way up in the air, that sort of thing.

And remembering that made me think of a pub that our parents would occassionally take us to, somewhere in the sprawling suburbs of north london, and this place had a tree growing right through the middle of it, a big knobbly trunk that must have been centuries old. I did a quick google search but couldn't find where this was but it looks like there are a few pubs like that dotted around the world, including an irish pub in Soho that i've never been to. Now I can't imagine that these places aren't completely tacky, but god it was a super exciting thing for 6-year old me, eating crisps and dreaming of our future life in the trees

thank you for starting this thread, rob. i actually come from a forestry family. My dad was a forester in the private sector (booo) and his dad worked for the federal forest service his whole career. it's cool having a forester dad because when you drive or hike you can just randomly ask him to identify a tree and he can usually do it. i got super into it in my 30s. I used to walk around rock creek park in DC with my tree ID book. personal faves: Catalpa, Live Oak, Southern Magnolia, etc.

map, i also love those cottonwoods. my brother lives in Durango and i remember asking my dad about them the last time we were out there

1. Crape myrtle, beautiful when in bloom and when turning. often used as a landscaping tree where they trim them to keep them short. this has been referred to as crape murder

2. Mimosa because they're so extra, the Auntie Mame of trees. these are weed trees, similar to the mulberry you also mentioned. they will pop up anywhere in the south.

9. A saucer magnolia next to my childhood home. Also tallest in its neighborhood. you must mean southern magnolia. the saucer magnolia is basically a shrub, decorative plant. they do not get that tall

seeing more ginko (STINKO!) trees but goddamn the yellow they turn to in the fall. cool leaves too. tomboto is probably well aware of the leafy streets near dupont circle that smell like cat puke due to the berries

we have a big silver maple in our backyard that is such a good shade tree, but landscaping architect ppl rightfully hate it because of the shallow roots and shorter life span. it's always dropping limbs during the slightest windiness. Pin Oaks are good street trees for being the opposite

A tree I've never seen IRL but would like to someday is a swampy bald cypress.

― salsa shark, Monday, November 17, 2025 5:23 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

just the coolest fucking trees. the only tree i've seen with knobs

my favourites are paperbark maple & amelanchier lamarckii - in fact I’ve got four of the latter in my garden

I wrote this impressionistic babble after stumbling into a yew chase on the South Downs above Chichester Harbour. I was clearly in some fugue state from heat and fatigue, but I immediately snapped to attention, and I don't know, something happened that I've still not properly processed.

Out of reverie into a yew chase. Sudden clammy dark, aware of being in a new space. Spontaneous tears. Reverence. I drop my gaze. What is this? The sudden cold dark? The density and plurality of the forms? Pink folds of ancient wood? What is this? I find myself murmuring imprecations, words of supplication, votive and reverent. Reaching out, I grasp the warm ribbed wood. But wood doesn't do its descriptive job here. Not wood. It's too present, too springy and tensile. Too ready to move. I rest in an available cleft and murmur that I'm ready to join if necessary. Amalgamate. A madman in his padded arbor. The chase spreads, these periodic cool atria all down the valley's puckered walls; each grove a restatement of the truth.
I emerge onto the ugly scar of road at the bottom, rising once more onto a bare down beyond. I glance repeatedly over my shoulder at the dark dampness of it, certain it moves, certain it shifts into new configurations between each glance, each blink. I hope. I hope.