What is the oldest tree in Boston?

Boston's relationship with its trees is a long ledger of documented losses, and that is precisely what makes the survivors verifiable. The Liberty Tree, the elm under which the Sons of Liberty gathered, was felled by Loyalists in August 1775 and the city has marked the spot ever since. The Great Elm of the Common, once called the city's oldest inhabitant, blew down in 1876 and was mourned in print. The Public Garden's lagoon willow, the most photographed tree in the city, collapsed as recently as July 2026. Each loss was recorded, which means each survivor stands in an unusually well-documented landscape. The Shaw Memorial elms have flanked their spot through all of it, planted in the decades around 1800 when the Common's tree-lined malls were laid out. Across town the Arnold Arboretum, founded 1872 and run by Harvard, keeps accession cards on its collection the way a library catalogues books, which is how a white oak that predates the Arboretum and a Franklinia extinct in the wild both carry paperwork most ancient trees never get.