Which Canadian City Has the Most Maple Trees? 2.5 Million Public Trees, Mapped

Of nine big Canadian cities I checked, Ottawa is the maple-iest. Of the 299,004 trees in the City of Ottawa's public tree inventory, 29.7% are maples, a nose ahead of Montreal (28.5%) and Toronto (27.0%). Vancouver comes fourth at 23.0%, and Calgary brings up the rear: just 1.9% of its trees are maples.

It's mid-October, the maples are turning, and every city's tree inventory is sitting on its open data portal. So I downloaded nine of them (Vancouver, New Westminster, Victoria and Kelowna in BC, plus Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal) and counted 2,547,805 trees by type. Some findings are what you'd expect. Others aren't: Vancouver's single most common street tree isn't a maple, Victoria's top tree is an oak, and Calgary's inventory lists more cherry and plum trees than Vancouver's.

Below: an interactive map, a "pick a tree" ranking, Vancouver neighbourhood by neighbourhood, a quiz, and what the tree out front means when you're buying a home.

The map

Each dot is a city, coloured by the share of its public trees in each group. These are trees the city owns and looks after: mostly boulevard trees in front of homes, plus park trees in most cities (the method section has exactly what each inventory covers). Tap a city for its five most common kinds of tree.

Which Canadian city has the most maple trees?

By share, it's Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, then Vancouver. By raw count, Toronto wins easily, with 185,621 maples on its streets, but it also has the biggest inventory here (688,279 street trees), so the share is the fairer comparison.

Ottawa's top species is the sugar maple (25,629 trees), followed by Norway maple (19,769) and red maple (18,872). In Toronto and Montreal, the single most common tree of any kind is the Norway maple: 99,736 in Toronto and 39,602 in Montreal.

The prairie cities are a different world. Maples are 3.7% of Edmonton's trees and 1.9% of Calgary's. A Calgary fall is yellow (poplar, aspen, ash, elm), not red.

Every city's top trees

A few things jump out.

Vancouver is Blossom City. 16.4% of its street trees are cherries and plums, the highest share of the nine, and the single most common species is the Japanese flowering cherry (13,510 trees), just ahead of the Norway maple (12,729). Cherry plums, which include the purple-leaf plums, add another 10,802.

Victoria's top tree is a local. Oaks are 17.1% of the City of Victoria's inventory, and 5,200 of its 5,921 oaks are Garry oaks, the native oak of southern Vancouver Island.

Calgary has more cherry and plum trees than Vancouver. 33,440 against 29,887. Before anyone in Calgary books a blossom festival: about 74% of them are chokecherries, and Calgary's inventory also covers parks while Vancouver's is street trees only.

Kelowna and New Westminster are the mixed bags. Kelowna's top five are maple, ash, honey locust, pine and plane tree, all between 8.7% and 21.9%. New Westminster's inventory has 104 genera in just 15,571 trees, the most variety for its size of any city here.

Some highlights from that tool: Edmonton leads on elm (20.4%), Victoria on oak, Kelowna on honey locust (12.3%, ahead of Montreal and Toronto), and Calgary on spruce (22.7%). Calgary is also the most evergreen city overall: 26% of its public trees keep their needles all winter, against 9% in Vancouver.

Vancouver, neighbourhood by neighbourhood

The City of Vancouver records the local area for each street tree, so I ran the same count across its 22 neighbourhoods (3,670 identified trees have no local area and are left out of this table only). Maples dominate the north and centre of the city; cherries and plums are strongest in the south.

Downtown is the maple capital of Vancouver (33% of its street trees) and the least cherry-heavy neighbourhood (4%). Dunbar-Southlands is the opposite: 25% cherries and plums, the most in the city, with Arbutus Ridge right behind at 24%. Cherries and plums are the most common street tree in 4 of the 22 neighbourhoods; maples top the rest.

My read: if spring blossoms on your block matter to you, the odds are best across the south half of the city (Dunbar-Southlands, Arbutus Ridge, Victoria-Fraserview, Marpole and Sunset have the highest cherry and plum shares). If you want big fall colour, the maple-heavy areas are Downtown, Fairview and the West End.

The ash problem

One layer on the map is less fun. The emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle that, in the Canadian Food Inspection Agency's words, "attacks and kills ash trees", was confirmed in Vancouver in May 2024, the first detection of its larvae in BC. Add all nine inventories together and the single most common tree species in them is the green ash (201,376 trees), ahead of the American elm (188,377) and the Norway maple (174,911).

Vancouver's exposure is modest: 7,976 ash street trees, 4.4% of the total. The prairie cities are another story. Ash is 19.9% of Edmonton's public trees and 16.0% of Calgary's, mostly green ash, and Kelowna is the most ash-heavy of the four BC cities here, at 13.0%. I'm not making any prediction about where the beetle goes next. The point is simply how much of each city's canopy is the one kind of tree it targets.

Too many maples?

Urban foresters have a rule of thumb for avoiding exactly that problem, first published by Frank Santamour in 1990: a city's trees should be no more than 10% of any one species, 20% of any one genus, or 30% of any family. It's a guideline, not a law, but it's a handy yardstick.

7 of the 9 cities are over 20% on a single genus: maples in Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and Kelowna, spruce in Calgary and elm in Edmonton. Only Victoria (17.1% oak) and New Westminster (18.1% maple) stay under. Edmonton is the one to watch: its top two genera, elm and ash, add up to 40% of its public trees. The genus counts aren't comparable city to city, by the way: bigger inventories and more careful records find more genera.

What this means if you're buying a home

If you want the cherry blossoms on your own street, start with homes for sale in Dunbar or browse all 4,742 Vancouver listings on EstateBlock (as of Oct 14, 2026). New Westminster, the most varied mix of trees here, has 597 homes for sale. For the numbers that move prices, my Greater Vancouver market update has the latest benchmark prices, and for more open-data fun, see when it snows in Vancouver and the best trick-or-treating streets. Curious what your own place would sell for? Get an instant evaluation.

How I did this

I downloaded each city's public tree inventory on October 14, 2026, from its open data portal (query URLs are saved with the research for this post), and grouped every tree by genus, the first word of its botanical name. Ottawa publishes common names only ("Maple Sugar", "Spruce White"), so I matched those to genera by hand. Rows with no genus (stumps, vacant planting sites, hedges, "unknown") are left out. I fixed obvious spelling slips in botanical names (such as "Thuya" for Thuja) so they count with the right genus.

The inventories are not identical. Vancouver and Toronto publish street trees only, while most of the others also include park trees, and Montreal's covers the boroughs in the city's central system. That's why I compare shares, not raw counts, and why Toronto's 688,279 trees don't mean Toronto has more trees than anyone else. None of this counts trees on private property, which in most of these cities is where much of the canopy is.

"Evergreens" means evergreen conifers: spruce, pine, cedar and thuja, fir, Douglas fir, hemlock, juniper, yew, cypress and their relatives. Larch and dawn redwood drop their needles, so they count as deciduous. "Cherries and plums" is the whole Prunus genus, which also includes chokecherries and other flowering and fruiting relatives. City nicknames are mine and a joke. Base map from Natural Earth (public domain).

The ash borer detection comes from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency; the 10-20-30 guideline as summarized by The Garden Professors.