What is the oldest tree in Boston?

The two English Elms flanking the Shaw Memorial on Boston Common, planted between 1772 and 1812, are the oldest documented trees growing in Boston ground. Older still is the Larz Anderson Hinoki Cypress at the Arnold Arboretum, a bonsai begun in Japan in 1737. Outside the city, the Endicott Pear in Danvers was planted in the 1630s and is the oldest tree on this list.

Is the Liberty Tree still standing?

No. The Liberty Tree, the elm where Boston's revolutionary protests gathered, was felled by Loyalists in August 1775. A plaque and a bas-relief mark the site at Washington and Essex Streets; no tree on this list claims its mantle.

Are Boston's remarkable trees free to visit?

All thirteen are free. Two stand on Boston Common and in the Public Garden, seven in the Arnold Arboretum (open free daily, Orange Line to Forest Hills), three across the river in Cambridge, and one, the Endicott Pear, in Danvers, where it is seen through its fence beside a hospital car park.

What is a Franklinia and why does Boston have one?

Franklinia alatamaha is a small flowering tree that has been extinct in the wild since the early 1800s; every living one descends from seeds collected in Georgia before then. The Arnold Arboretum's specimen, accessioned in 1905, flowers in late summer.

United States

Ancient Trees in Boston

Boston lost its two most famous trees long ago: the Liberty Tree to a Loyalist axe in 1775 and the Great Elm of the Common to a storm in 1876. What survived is stranger. Two English elms have flanked the Shaw Memorial since around 1800, and the Arnold Arboretum keeps accession cards on its trees like a library catalogue. Below: a Common and Public Garden pair, seven in the Arboretum including a bonsai begun in 1737, three in Cambridge, and in Danvers a pear planted in the 1630s that still fruits beside a hospital car park. All are free.

Highlights

The Shaw Memorial Elms

English Elm · 214-254 years

Newton's Apple Tree at MIT

Apple

Photo: Kenneth C. Zirkel (CC BY 4.0)

All 13 trees

The Shaw Memorial Elms

English Elm · 214-254 years

Augustus Saint-Gaudens's memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th was built around these two elms, not the other way round. The trees came first, planted somewhere between 1772 and 1812, probably under the 1780 permission to plant elms across from John Hancock's mansion while he was governor. The bronze arrived in 1897 and sits on a vault designed to spare their roots. The Boston Globe calls them the oldest English elms in the Western Hemisphere. One caveat on the species. Two institutional sources and the memorial's own conservation record call them English elm; a single minority account describes them as American elm. The weight of evidence sits with English elm, but the disagreement is real. Their survival is not luck. In 1927 they were written off as close to dead. The arborist Henry Davis began treating them free of charge in the 1970s and the care has never stopped: bricks packed inside the hollow trunks for stability, six to eight feet taken off the crowns in 2013, inspections every fortnight. That retrenchment pruning is what gives them the blunt, cut back outline they carry through winter. Even the cramped root vault helps, densifying the wood against Dutch elm disease. Prunings have been turned into pens and sold. The two of them stand where the Freedom Trail meets Beacon and Park, shading the regiment they now outlive by more than a century.

The Peters Hill White Oak

White Oak · 195-220 years

Harvard's Arnold Arboretum has been cataloguing plants since 1872 and did not get round to this one until 2010. It shows up on an 1894 city survey of Peters Hill, already growing wild on ground the Arboretum later absorbed, so when it was finally accessioned it went into the books as found growing in place rather than planted. It may be the oldest tree in the entire landscape. In 2018 a core taken from the southwest stem gave 142 countable rings, with perhaps 60 more lost in a hollow centre, putting germination in the early 1800s. It is double leadered, two stems fused near the base with the seam still visible, roughly 17 metres tall and spreading 28 metres over the crabapple collection below it. A 1927 bird's eye map of the Arboretum drew it as a lone shepherd guarding an endless flock, the flock at the time being hawthorns that have since been replaced. Two honest notes. Everything known about this tree comes from the Arboretum itself, rigorous work with published ring counts, but we found nothing independent of the institution. And no coordinates are published, so the pin is the northeast slope of Peters Hill above the crabapples rather than the trunk. Walk up the slope and look for the widest crown on the hill. At that spread it is not a difficult hunt.

The Franklin Tree of the Explorers Garden

Franklin Tree · 121 years

There is no wild Franklinia anywhere on earth and there has not been for about two hundred years. John Bartram found the species growing on a few acres beside the Altamaha River in Georgia in 1765, his son William collected seed around 1776, and within roughly fifty years the wild population was gone and never seen again. Every Franklin tree alive today, in every garden in the world, descends from that one collection. This is one of the oldest of them. The Arnold Arboretum took it in as a rooted cutting in 1905 from a Pennsylvania nursery, on a line traceable back to material from 1884. The International Dendrology Society, which has no stake in Harvard's reputation, calls it the largest and oldest known example of the species anywhere, and photographed it standing in October 2025. It is a small tree in the tea family and the only member of its genus, and it flowers on an odd schedule. Large cream white flowers with a boss of yellow stamens open late in the season, so the last of them are still out while the leaves around them are turning red. Seeing both at once on the same branch is the reason to come. It grows in the Explorers Garden on Bussey Hill. No coordinates are published for the individual plant, so the pin is the garden and the labels there take you the rest of the way.

Autumn colour

The Dawn Redwood of the Public Garden

Dawn Redwood · 63 years

Until 1944 this species was known only from fossils and assumed to have been extinct for millions of years. Then living Metasequoia turned up in Sichuan, and in early 1948 the first seeds to leave China arrived at Harvard's Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain, a few miles from where this tree stands, just ahead of the door closing on scientific exchange with China for decades. The Arboretum raised seedlings and sent them around the world. This one was planted in the Public Garden in 1963, one of four here. It is not old, and it is not pretending to be. At about 63 it earns its place on what it is rather than how long it has stood. Dawn redwood is a deciduous conifer, which most people meet for the first time in autumn, when a tree that plainly looks like a redwood turns foxy orange and drops every needle it has. The trunk is fluted and deeply hollowed under each branch, another oddity of the species, and a younger 'Gold Rush' cultivar stands across the path for comparison. One note on sourcing: the 1963 planting date and the exact placement come from the Friends of the Public Garden, whose own people care for the tree, and we found no record of this specimen independent of them.

Autumn colour

The Original Dawn Redwood of the Arboretum

Dawn Redwood · 77 years

This tree grew from the seed shipment that put a fossil back into the ground. In 1948 the Arnold Arboretum took delivery of seed collected in Hubei, China, from a species that had been known to science only from fossils until living trees turned up in the interior a few years earlier. The seed was raised here, and the Arboretum's own account of what came up is worth quoting: the first of its kind to grow in North America in over two million years. The accession number is 524-48. From that lot and its siblings, dawn redwoods went out to gardens across the world, which is how a tree that was a rumour inside living memory became an ordinary sight on ordinary streets. It stands near the Hunnewell Visitor Center, opposite the Arborway Gate, so it is the first thing worth walking to once you are through. It is also fifteen years older than the dawn redwood in the Public Garden across town, and its senior in the plainest sense: same species, same 1948 seed, one generation up. One honest note on the record. A separately numbered 1948 accession is described elsewhere as the Arboretum's oldest dawn redwood, out along Conifer Path, and we could not establish whether that is this tree under a second label or a sibling raised from the same seed. Both came off the same shipment.

The Wilson Paperbark Maple

Paperbark Maple · 119 years

Almost every paperbark maple in America descends from two seedlings one man dug out of a Chinese wood in the autumn of 1907. The plant collector Ernest Henry Wilson found them in forest north of Yichang, in Hubei, lifted them and shipped them to the Arnold Arboretum. Both survived. This is one of the two, accession 12488, and by the Arboretum's record the pair are the first and the oldest paperbark maples on the continent and the genetic source of most of the ones planted in the country since. The species has gone the other way at home. Acer griseum is now endangered in the wild in China, its remaining stands small and scattered, which makes a specimen tree in Jamaica Plain a piece of conservation as much as a piece of horticulture. Come in winter. The bark is what the tree is named for and it is the reason to make the walk: it lifts off the trunk in thin cinnamon and copper curls that stay attached rather than falling, and with the leaves gone and low sun on it the trunk is the whole show. One note on the record. All of the above traces back to the Arboretum, including a published feature written out of its own history, so this is one institution's account, thorough and public, but not independently corroborated. No coordinates exist for the individual tree. The pin is the maple collection off Meadow Road, about ten minutes up from the Forest Hills gate.

The Larz Anderson Hinoki Cypress

Hinoki Cypress · 289 years

This tree is 289 years old and it fits on a table. It was started in 1737, when Boston was still a colonial port, and it has spent every one of those years in a pot, watered and pruned by somebody, without a gap. Larz Anderson, a Harvard graduate and American ambassador to Japan, bought it from the Yokohama Nursery Company around 1913 with roughly 39 other bonsai and shipped the lot home to his estate in Brookline, where it stood on his terraces for 24 years. After he and his wife Isabel died, the collection passed to the Arnold Arboretum, which eventually built a pavilion to house it. A cutting taken in 2017 is displayed beside it, the same tree at nine years old and at 289. Two things to know before you go. The 1737 date comes from Anderson's own records rather than from any independent dating, so it is one careful line of evidence repeated by everyone since, not two. And the pavilion rotates around 30 trees through its display every two or three weeks from mid April to late October, so this particular one is not guaranteed to be out on the day you arrive; the pavilion posts what is currently on view. It is ten minutes on foot from Forest Hills, and the Arboretum around it is worth the trip whatever is in the display that week.

The Sapporo Katsuras

Katsura · 148 years

These two trees began as seed in a packet posted from Sapporo. William S. Clark, president of Massachusetts Agricultural College and the man who left his Japanese students the parting line "Boys, be ambitious", went to Hokkaido in 1876 to help found what is now Hokkaido University. He collected katsura seed there and sent a share to his friend Charles Sprague Sargent, the Arnold Arboretum's first director. It arrived in 1878, six years after the Arboretum itself existed at all, and the two multi stemmed trees on Meadow Road are what grew from it. They are the oldest katsuras in a collection of 35 and among the oldest documented anywhere in North America. Come in October. Katsura leaves turn apricot and gold, and as they fall and dry they give off a smell most people read as burnt sugar or candy floss; you often catch it before you find the tree. Winter is worth a different look, the silvery grey bark peeling away in narrow rectangular sheets and curved seed follicles hanging on into the cold before the wind takes the seed. Sargent went to Hokkaido himself in 1892 and wrote about katsura as a defining tree of the island's wet lowland woods. One note on sourcing: both accounts here are the Arboretum's own, a plant record and an Arnoldia article rather than two unconnected institutions, though the article's author visited and describes both trees alive and in health.

The Longfellow Linden

Small-leaved Lime · 220 years

In the summer of 1844 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow came home to find that workmen had "lopped away the long low branches of my Linden tree, misunderstanding my directions", and he wrote it up in his journal as a small catastrophe. The tree outlived him. It went into the ground around 1800 to 1810, planted by Andrew Craigie, who owned the Brattle Street estate before the poet came to it in 1843, and it stands on the East Lawn of a house that had served as George Washington's headquarters during the siege of Boston a generation before the linden existed. Fanny Longfellow wrote in 1843 of wanting "a linden avenue in which my poet intends to pace in his old age". This is the only tree of that avenue still standing. By 1846 he was describing her reading Heine underneath it. The National Park Service puts it at 82 feet, against roughly 60 for the species, with a trunk 84 inches through, and rates its condition fair to poor: the trunk cavity is filled, cables carry the branches, heavy pruning comes round every five years. Since the early 2000s the park has been growing a genetically identical cutting against the day it goes. The grounds are free and open in daylight; only the house tours are ticketed.

The Houghton Beech

Copper Beech · 240 years

This is Cambridge's only living Historic Landmark, and it was made one in 1985 to stop a building. A developer's plans for the site would have taken a third of the copper beech's crown and finished it off, so about thirty neighbours formed a group called the Friends of the Beech Tree and petitioned the city; the Historical Commission designated the tree itself, the legal instrument normally reserved for buildings. The Harvard Crimson, reporting from the October 1985 hearing, called it 203 years old, which puts its planting around 1782 and makes it roughly 240 now. That figure carries more weight than the biography printed around it in the same article, which has Henry O. Houghton serving as mayor decades before he founded the Riverside Press. A 2018 local survey of Cambridge trees offers a looser "planted 150+ years ago", a lower bound rather than a contradiction. Houghton planted three beeches on his family estate here. This is the one left. MIT bought the property in the 1970s and took down the buildings, and the tree stayed, which is how a private estate specimen ended up standing on a public sidewalk on Massachusetts Avenue between Central and Harvard. Most of Boston's notable trees sit inside curated collections. This one you walk past on the way to the bus.

Newton's Apple Tree at MIT

Apple

This is not the tree Newton sat under. It is a living descendant of that one, the apple at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, and it stands in the President's Garden off MIT's Infinite Corridor, where it bears fruit like any other apple tree. MIT's own facts page records it as a gift from Ed Vetter, class of 1942, and gives no planting date. Nobody appears to have written one down. If you know when it went in, tell us. What is documented is the morning somebody came to take a piece of it. In 2009 the Tufts cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin asked the MIT physicist Alan Guth about the tree, MIT's president Susan Hockfield gave her permission, and a Tufts grounds manager drove over and cut three branches off it. Those are now a tree in Medford. An apple cultivar only travels by hand, one graft at a time. The cultivar is worth a sentence. Descendants of the Woolsthorpe tree are 'Flower of Kent' wherever they turn up, a big, coarse cooking apple nobody grows for flavour any more, which is why it is named that way here; MIT's own page does not say so. MIT's Main Group buildings were reported open to the public on weekdays, 6am to 7pm, in December 2022. That was a few years ago and campus rules move, so treat the hours as a good bet rather than a promise.

Photo: Kenneth C. Zirkel (CC BY 4.0)

The Wilson Black Pine of Peters Hill

Japanese Black Pine · 107 years

Ernest Henry Wilson was already home from his last expedition to Japan when he stopped at a nursery in Yokohama and bought a handful of pine seed almost as an afterthought. That seed, sown at the Arnold Arboretum in 1919, grew into the pine that now greets everyone who climbs Peters Hill Road from the Peters Hill Gate. A century of wind has done the shaping. The trunk twists rather than rises, and the lower limbs dip low before curling back up, the look Japanese gardeners spend decades training into a tree and this one simply grew into on its own. Two siblings from the same seed lot stand nearby, but the Arboretum's own account singles this one out as the largest and the most sculptural of the three. Wilson spent years in China and Japan collecting plants for Boston, and the Arboretum still tracks this pine by the same accession number, 11371*J, that a clerk wrote down when it arrived. It turned 100 in 2019 and nobody has found a reason to expect it will stop now. Every record on this tree traces back to the Arboretum itself, which keeps better books on its own collection than anyone else could. No outside account has turned up yet. If you know one, tell us.

Endicott Pear Tree

European Pear · 390 years

The oldest living cultivated fruit tree in North America grows beside a hospital car park in Danvers, about 25 kilometres north of Boston. It is a pear, planted sometime between 1632 and about 1640 by John Endecott, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and it is the only survivor of his orchard. It has had a hard four centuries. It came through a storm in 1770. In 1952 a CBS-Hytron plant and its parking lot went up around it until it was nearly hidden. In 1964 vandals took a hacksaw to its branches and trunk and cut it down to about six feet. It grew back. A chain-link fence with barbed wire went up afterwards, and a fence is still what you see it through. The tree once stood about 80 feet tall, by an account from 1875. It is far smaller now. It still fruits. A December 2024 article reports that it bears pears, a Bon Chrétien sugar pear, and a photograph dated May 2025 shows it standing. If you have seen it since, tell us how it looks. You cannot walk up to it. The North Shore Medical Center owns it and looks after it with the town, a 2011 marker overlooks it from beside the lot, and a display in the hospital lobby tells its story. From central Boston this is a car trip, or well over an hour by train and bus.

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Frequently asked

What is the oldest tree in Boston?: The two English Elms flanking the Shaw Memorial on Boston Common, planted between 1772 and 1812, are the oldest documented trees growing in Boston ground. Older still is the Larz Anderson Hinoki Cypress at the Arnold Arboretum, a bonsai begun in Japan in 1737. Outside the city, the Endicott Pear in Danvers was planted in the 1630s and is the oldest tree on this list.
Is the Liberty Tree still standing?: No. The Liberty Tree, the elm where Boston's revolutionary protests gathered, was felled by Loyalists in August 1775. A plaque and a bas-relief mark the site at Washington and Essex Streets; no tree on this list claims its mantle.
Are Boston's remarkable trees free to visit?: All thirteen are free. Two stand on Boston Common and in the Public Garden, seven in the Arnold Arboretum (open free daily, Orange Line to Forest Hills), three across the river in Cambridge, and one, the Endicott Pear, in Danvers, where it is seen through its fence beside a hospital car park.
What is a Franklinia and why does Boston have one?: Franklinia alatamaha is a small flowering tree that has been extinct in the wild since the early 1800s; every living one descends from seeds collected in Georgia before then. The Arnold Arboretum's specimen, accessioned in 1905, flowers in late summer.
More like this: 3 of these trees also appear in Autumn Worth the Trip.
Ancient trees in nearby cities: Sunderland, Massachusetts · Simsbury · New York · Martinsville, New Jersey · Princeton, New Jersey · Montreal · Philadelphia · Chadds Ford · Every city on the map

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