Evergreen Tree Emoji

A tall coniferous tree: pine, fir, or spruce. The tree of forests, mountains, Christmas, and environmental permanence. 🌲 stays green when everything else goes bare, which is why human beings have been using it as a symbol of life, endurance, and rebirth for thousands of years.

Evergreens dominate the boreal forest, or taiga, the largest land biome on Earth. It covers 17 million square kilometres across Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia, roughly 29% of the world's forest area. Keeping needles through winter is a metabolic shortcut: conifers do not have to spend energy rebuilding foliage every spring, which is how they survive latitudes where deciduous trees cannot.

In culture, the evergreen has been a symbol of eternal life since well before Christianity. Egyptians brought green palms indoors at winter solstice. Romans decorated with evergreen boughs during Saturnalia. Germanic peoples hung fir branches to ward off evil spirits. The modern Christmas tree is usually traced to 16th-century Strasbourg, and then popularised in England when Prince Albert set one up for Queen Victoria in 1840, but the underlying idea (green in winter equals life persists) is millennia older.

Online, 🌲 is the emoji of forests and Christmas. Google Trends shows a clean Q4 spike in 'tree emoji' searches every single year, driven by people hunting for Christmas tree shorthand. The rest of the year, 🌲 is hiking, National Parks, Minecraft, and the Pacific Northwest.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F332U+1F332 EVERGREEN TREE.

🌲 splits cleanly into two seasons.

Q4, October through December. The evergreen doubles as a Christmas tree. 🎄 is more popular for explicit holiday posts, but 🌲 covers the pre-decoration version: tree farms, 'getting the tree' content, Christmas markets, and debates about real versus artificial. Oregon alone grows more than 6 million Christmas trees per year, and the US industry clears $2 billion annually.

The rest of the year, nature and forests. Hiking content, National Park visits, camping trips, environmental advocacy. In the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Washington, British Columbia), 🌲 is almost a regional emoji. The Douglas fir and Sitka spruce shape the regional character and identity.

Environmental campaigns. Reforestation, carbon capture, forest conservation. One Tree Planted and Ecosia (the search engine that plants a tree every ~50 searches) lean on 🌲 and 🌱 in their branding. Ecosia has planted over 225 million trees as of 2026.

Gaming. 🌲 is the iconic first resource in Minecraft, Terraria, Rust, and almost every survival-crafting game. 'Punch a tree' has been gaming's universal first step since Minecraft launched in 2009.

On LinkedIn, 🌲 shows up mostly in corporate sustainability content. On Instagram, it's hiking and cabin aesthetics. On Twitter/X, it's roughly split between climate posts and 'touch grass' jokes.

The evergreen-as-symbol-of-eternal-life tradition predates Christianity by thousands of years. Egyptians brought green date palms indoors during the winter solstice, symbolising life's triumph over death. Romans decorated with evergreen boughs during Saturnalia. Norse and Germanic peoples treated evergreens as magical because they stayed green while everything else died back.

The modern Christmas tree is usually traced to 16th-century Strasbourg, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, where families decorated firs in their homes. Martin Luther is popularly credited with adding the first candles, though this is more legend than record. Prince Albert, originally from the German duchy of Saxe-Coburg, popularised the tradition in England after marrying Queen Victoria in 1840. An engraving of the royal family gathered around their tree, published in the Illustrated London News in 1848, spread the custom to the middle class in Britain and the US within a decade.

In parallel, Japan has its own deep pine symbolism. Matsu (pine) is one of the 'three friends of winter' alongside plum and bamboo, representing longevity, resilience, and virtue. Kadomatsu, pairs of pine and bamboo decorations, go up at entryways for New Year. When Japanese users reach for 🌲, it often carries matsu symbolism rather than Christmas.

1. 2010Approved in Unicode 6.0 as EVERGREEN TREE (U+1F332)
2. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0; platforms ship a triangular conifer design
3. 2018Google and Samsung redesign with more detailed textures and shadow

• •The boreal forest (taiga) is Earth's largest land biome: 17 million km², about 29% of the world's forest area. It wraps Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia in an unbroken belt of evergreen conifer.
• •The oldest known living tree is a bristlecone pine named Methuselah) in California's White Mountains, over 4,855 years old. Its location is kept secret by the US Forest Service. There is an even older unnamed bristlecone nearby, estimated at 5,068 years.
• •Google Trends 'tree emoji' searches spike 2 to 4x every Q4, driven by Christmas tree shorthand. The pattern has been clean and consistent since at least 2020.
• •The tallest known tree is Hyperion), a coast redwood in northern California standing 115.92 m (380.3 ft). Its exact location is also secret. Measuring it required climbing with a tape, because no laser works through that much canopy.
• •In Minecraft, 'punch a tree' has been the first action for new players since 2009. That single mechanic made 🌲 the most-farmed resource in survival gaming.
• •Finland is 73% forest, the most forested country in Europe. The Finnish word metsä (forest) appears in hundreds of compound words and is central to Finnish identity.
• •The US Christmas tree industry is worth over $2 billion annually. Oregon alone grows over 6 million trees per year. Most are harvested at 7 to 10 years old, with about 1,000 to 1,500 trees per acre.
• •Ecosia, the search engine that plants trees with ad revenue, has planted over 225 million trees since 2009. Roughly one tree per ~45 searches.