Which Canadian City Has the Biggest Street Trees? Vancouver, With Victoria Right Behind

About one in seven street trees in Vancouver has a trunk at least 60 cm across. In Calgary it's one in 21. I went through 1,559,857 measured street trees in six Canadian cities, and the two BC cities win the trunk contest: Vancouver has the biggest share of big trees (14.4% are 60 cm or more), and Victoria has the chunkiest typical tree (a median trunk of 27 cm).

Every one of these cities keeps a public inventory of the trees it owns along its streets, with the species, the address and the trunk diameter, measured the way arborists do it, at chest height. It's leaf-raking season, so I wanted to know whose leaves are falling from the biggest trees. And the single "biggest" tree in all the data is a silver maple in Toronto with a recorded trunk of 93.8 metres. More on that below.

Scroll down for the city ranking, a hug-test calculator for the tree outside your window, a map of Vancouver's big-tree neighbourhoods, and a quiz.

The ranking: who has the chunkiest street trees

I used two measures. The median trunk is the middle tree: half the city's street trees are thinner, half are thicker. The share of trees 60 cm or more across (about two feet, roughly the width of a kitchen counter is deep) tells you how many proper big trees line the streets. The two BC cities take first and second on both, just in a different order.

Vancouver leads at 14.4%, then Victoria (12.3%), Montreal (10.0%), Edmonton (8.8%), Toronto (8.0%), with Calgary last at 4.8%. Vancouver also has the biggest share of street trees a metre or more across (1.63%, or 2,916 trees). My read on why the coast wins: a long, mild, wet growing season, and plenty of boulevards that were planted generations ago. Calgary and Edmonton have short summers, cold winters and younger suburbs full of recent plantings, so a lot of their street trees are still teenagers. Toronto and Montreal have plenty of old trees, but they also have hundreds of thousands of newer ones, which pulls the shares down.

The median flips the top two. Victoria's middle street tree is 27 cm across, then Vancouver 25 cm, Montreal 19 cm, Edmonton 17 cm, Toronto 17 cm, Calgary 16 cm. Victoria's boulevards have a fatter middle; Vancouver has more true giants at the top end. Most street trees everywhere are small: under 30 cm across for 53% to 74% of trees, depending on the city. Cities plant young trees, and young trees are thin.

The hug test: how does the tree outside your window rank?

You don't need a forestry degree for this. Wrap a tape measure around the trunk at chest height, enter the number, and the calculator divides by pi to get the diameter and tells you what share of each city's street trees your tree beats. If you don't have a tape, use a piece of string and measure the string.

For a feel of the numbers: a trunk about 157 cm around (50 cm across) beats 80% of Victoria's street trees, 79% of Vancouver's and 91% of Calgary's. To beat 99% of Vancouver's street trees you need a trunk of about 110 cm across, or roughly 3.5 metres around.

What the giants are

Toronto has more metre-wide street trees than the other five cities, 6,454 of them, partly because it simply has the most street trees (684,983 measured). Maples dominate: 3,542 of the giants, with oaks a distant second at 1,093. Montreal's giants are mostly maples too (909 of 1,073).

Edmonton's are elms: 208 of its 276 metre-wide street trees. Victoria's biggest are plane trees (60 of 159), then horse chestnuts and oaks. In Vancouver the metre-wide club is led by cedars (383), giant sequoias (342) and maples (316).

Some of the biggest street trees with believable measurements: in Victoria, a sweet chestnut recorded at 200 cm on 27 Moss St, a horsechestnut at 190 cm on 561 Dallas Rd and a giant sequoia at 180 cm on 506 Finlayson St. In Edmonton, a willow at 162 cm in Crestwood. These are the City's own entries; I haven't been out with a tape.

Vancouver's big-tree map

Vancouver's 178,747 measured street trees aren't spread evenly. Dunbar-Southlands has the biggest share of trees 60 cm or more (24.9%), followed by Kitsilano (23.7%) and West Point Grey (23.1%). At the other end, Downtown is at 1.5% and Victoria-Fraserview at 8.1%. Hastings-Sunrise simply has the most street trees, 13,534.

Switch the map to "Big-tree type" and a pattern shows up: in 11 of the 22 neighbourhoods the most common kind of tree among the ones 60 cm or more across is cherries and plums, and in 9 it's maples. Cherries and plums top the list across much of the east and south side; maples top it on most of the West Side and downtown. So the giant cherry outside your window isn't your imagination. My guess at why the West Side leads: big lots and wide boulevards that were planted a long time ago and left alone. (Age alone doesn't explain it: Strathcona, one of the oldest parts of the city, sits near the bottom.) For how old Canada's homes are city by city, see my age of homes post.

The 94-metre maple, and other trees that can't be real

Here's the funniest part of the data. If you just sort each inventory by trunk size, the top of the list is full of trees that would be among the biggest living things on Earth. Toronto's record holder is a silver maple on Cheltenham Avenue with a trunk recorded at 9,380 cm. That's 93.8 metres across, close to the length of a football field. Vancouver's is a pin oak on Columbia Street at 66.7 metres.

These are almost certainly typos or placeholder values: an extra digit, a decimal point in the wrong place, or a 999 that means “unknown”. A street tree with a trunk more than 2.5 metres across would be a famous landmark, not a line in a spreadsheet, so I left out every entry over 250 cm. That's 77 trees out of 1,559,934, too few to move any of the shares. A few odd entries under the cut-off remain (Calgary's list has several shrubs and small trees, a lilac among them, recorded at 2.2 to 2.5 metres across), which is why I lean on medians and shares rather than crowning a single biggest tree.

What big street trees mean if you're buying

For the numbers that actually move prices, see my Greater Vancouver market update. For which trees are most common in each city, see the most common trees in Canadian cities. To shop the big-tree neighbourhoods, start with Dunbar listings, Vancouver houses for sale, or get an instant evaluation of your own place.

How I did this

Each city publishes its tree inventory as open data, with a trunk diameter at breast height (DBH, measured about 1.3 to 1.4 m above the ground) for each tree. I downloaded them on November 5, 2026, and kept street trees only, so a city with big park forests in its inventory doesn't get an unfair edge:

• Vancouver: City street trees on boulevards (the City's public-trees inventory; park trees are not included). Stumps and empty planting sites excluded. 178,747 trees with a recorded diameter.
• Victoria: City boulevard, median and hardscape (sidewalk) trees (park, setback and other categories excluded). 11,857 trees with a recorded diameter.
• Calgary: Live city trees on blocksides, boulevards, medians and traffic islands (park and reserve land excluded). 253,357 trees with a recorded diameter.
• Edmonton: City trees on boulevards, curbsides, medians, monowalks, alleys and service lanes (park, buffer and naturalized areas excluded). 211,742 trees with a recorded diameter.
• Toronto: City-owned street trees. 684,983 trees with a recorded diameter.
• Montreal: Public street trees (inventory type R, 'arbres de rue'); park trees (type H) excluded. 219,171 trees with a recorded diameter.

Trees with no diameter (or zero) are left out, and so is every diameter over 250 cm, which I treat as a data-entry error. Diameters are rounded to the nearest centimetre. Kinds of tree are grouped by genus (all maples together, all oaks together). Vancouver's inventory is mostly boulevard trees; I also dropped the 3,677 entries with no neighbourhood recorded, which sit at park addresses (most at 2000 W Georgia St, the Stanley Park entrance, and some on NW Marine Drive near UBC). With them in, Vancouver's 60 cm+ share would be 14.9%; it ranks first either way. Each city measures and updates its trees on its own schedule, so treat small differences between cities as noise.

Licences: Vancouver: Open Government Licence – Vancouver; Victoria: City of Victoria Open Data Licence; Calgary: Open Government Licence – City of Calgary; Edmonton: City of Edmonton Open Data Terms of Use; Toronto: Open Government Licence – Toronto; Montreal: CC BY 4.0.