Timeline

Toronto's canopy through time

Drag the slider across 125 years. Watch the city's 689,013 street trees accumulate, decade by decade, from a handful of 19th-century veterans through the post-war suburban wave to today's 50,000-tree-per-year planting programs.

2026 689,013 trees

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Street tree (estimated planted year ≤ slider)

Big caveat. The City of Toronto's dataset doesn't record when each tree was planted — only its trunk diameter today. So each tree's "planting year" here is estimated by dividing its DBH by a typical urban-tree growth rate (0.5 cm/yr for slow species like oak and ginkgo; 0.75 cm/yr default; 1.0+ cm/yr for fast species like silver maple and London plane). Individual estimates can easily be off by 10–20 years, but city-scale patterns (the post-war suburbia build-out, the 1990s Norway-maple wave, the big post-2010 planting program) are real and visible.

What to look for

Before 1950 — only the big veterans survive. Rosedale's bur oaks, Cabbagetown's American elms, the London planes along University Avenue. Everything else is either gone or planted later.

1950s–1960s — Toronto's first suburbs (Don Mills, Leaside, North York) fill in. Norway maples everywhere — the city planted tens of thousands of them before learning they'd become invasive.

1970s–1990s — after Dutch elm disease clears most of the elms, honey locust becomes the go-to replacement. The straight-line "Skyline" and "Shademaster" cultivars you see everywhere downtown date to this era.

2000s–2010s — the big post-EAB replanting. 200,000+ new trees in the 2010s alone. Freeman maple ('Autumn Blaze'), Kentucky coffeetree, hackberry, serviceberry — the diversification that Toronto's planting program has been chasing.

2020s — the saplings. Most of these dots are trees under 5 cm DBH: the program still plants ~40–50K new trees a year.

← Every tree, as a dot (the static version)