What is the oldest tree in Cambridge?

The Milton Mulberry at Christ's College, grown from the root of a tree planted in 1608 or 1609. A 1795 storm uprooted the original, but it regrew from the same root rather than being replaced, and still fruits today.

Is Newton's apple tree in Cambridge real?

The Trinity College tree, planted in 1954, is a genuine graft from the actual apple tree at Newton's childhood home, Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, reputed to be the tree that inspired his theory of gravity. It is not the original tree, but it is a direct vegetative descendant of it.

Where did the plane tree at Jesus College come from?

A seed collected in 1802 at Thermopylae, Greece, the site of the ancient battle, by Jesus College fellow Edward Daniel Clarke during his travels. It was planted in the college's Fellows' Garden and now stands over 25 metres tall.

Is Cambridge University Botanic Garden free to visit?

No, the Botanic Garden charges admission, with free entry for University of Cambridge students, staff and card-carrying members. It is open daily except Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

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Ancient Trees in Cambridge

Cambridge's remarkable trees live almost entirely inside college walls: a mulberry that grew back from its own roots after a 1795 storm, still fruiting from the tree Milton knew as a student, an apple tree grafted in 1954 from the specimen behind Newton's theory of gravity, and a plane grown from a seed a don carried home from the battlefield of Thermopylae. The Botanic Garden adds a redwood from the first seed shipped out of California and an oak that may be a one-off hybrid, all within a compact, walkable city.

Photo: N Chadwick, via Geograph/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Newton's Apple Tree

Apple, 'Flower of Kent' (Malus pumila) · 72 years · City centre

Isaac Newton studied and later worked at Trinity College, and the story that a falling apple set him thinking about gravity dates to accounts he gave late in life, describing a tree at his family home, Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, not anything in Cambridge itself. That original tree is thought to have died around 1815 to 1820, but not before cuttings and grafts had been taken from it and propagated onward as a genetically identical line. In 1954, Trinity College planted one of those grafts outside its main gate, directly below the room where Newton lived as a student. Being a 'Flower of Kent', an old English cooking apple variety, the tree produces fruit that is edible but unremarkable, tart and disease-prone rather than a variety anyone would choose for flavour alone. What makes it worth the stop is not the apples: it is standing in front of living plant tissue that traces back, graft by graft, to the actual tree behind one of science's most famous stories, fenced for protection but visible from the street outside Trinity's gate at any hour.

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Photo: Mr Ignavy, via Geograph/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Milton Mulberry

Black Mulberry (Morus nigra) · 417 years · City centre

James I wanted England to have a silk industry to rival France and Italy, and in the early 1600s ordered mulberry trees planted nationwide to feed silkworms. Christ's College planted one in its Fellows' Garden in 1608 or 1609, the year after the poet John Milton was born; by the time Milton arrived as a student in 1625, the tree was already established, and college tradition holds he spent time beneath it, though no contemporary record proves it directly. The silk scheme collapsed everywhere in England, partly because James's advisors specified the wrong species for silkworms to thrive on, but the mulberry outlived the industry it was planted for by well over a century. In 1795 a storm uprooted it completely. Rather than replace it with a sapling, the college's gardeners let it regrow from its own root system, and what stands today, propped on wooden posts, low and sprawling with trunks and branches poking out at odd angles from a raised mound, has been growing continuously from that same root for well over two centuries since. It still produces a real crop of mulberries each summer, which the college's gardeners harvest and turn into jam for the kitchens.

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The Oriental Plane of Jesus College

Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 224 years · City centre

Edward Daniel Clarke, a Jesus College fellow and later Cambridge's first professor of mineralogy, spent the years around 1800 travelling through Greece, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, a journey that eventually filled six published volumes and made him one of the era's best-known explorer-scholars. In 1802, at Thermopylae, the narrow pass where three hundred Spartans and their allies held off the Persian army in 480 BC, Clarke collected seed from the plane trees growing there. He brought it home to Jesus College and had it raised into seedlings; one of them was planted in the Fellows' Garden the same year. Oriental Planes are long-lived, broad-crowned trees native across the eastern Mediterranean, and this one has had well over two centuries in an English college garden to put on size, now standing more than 25 metres tall. It is a genuinely unusual case among Cambridge's collected trees: not a symbolic gift or a scientific graft, but a seed one traveller happened to pick up at one of the most storied battle sites in Western history and carry home in his luggage.

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The Giant Redwood of the Botanic Garden

Giant Redwood (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · 171 years · Newtown

In 1852, the Cornish plant collector William Lobb reached Calaveras Grove in California and became one of the first Europeans to see Giant Redwoods growing wild, trees already thousands of years old and taller than anything in Britain. Recognising what he had found, he cut his expedition short and raced seed back to England for the Veitch nursery in Exeter, which was selling seedlings within a year, an unusually fast turnaround for a tree nobody in Europe had grown before. Cambridge University Botanic Garden was among the very first customers, planting out its own seedlings around 1855. Two of that original planting still stand on opposite sides of the garden's Main Walk near the fountain, and a third, at the junction with Henslow Walk, has grown into the tallest tree in the entire garden at just over 30 metres. Redwoods take centuries to reach the scale they are famous for in California, so at under two hundred years old this specimen is, by the standards of its own species, still young, a fast-growing adolescent rather than anything close to the giants Lobb originally found.

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The Cambridge Oak

Hybrid Oak (Quercus x warburgii) · 152 years · Newtown

Most oaks on this site are one of a small handful of well-known species. The Cambridge Oak is not: it is a hybrid, most likely a cross between the evergreen Quercus rugosa, native to Mexico and the southwestern United States, and Britain's own native Pedunculate Oak, a pairing that should not naturally occur an ocean apart and that appears to exist, in this precise combination, only here. It came from the Worcester nursery of Messrs Smith sometime between 1873 and 1875 and was planted in Cambridge University Botanic Garden soon after. By 1910, the tree had already earned a place in Elwes and Henry's authoritative survey The Trees of Great Britain and Ireland, which singled it out as the finest specimen of its kind in the entire country, a claim about a tree that may have been, functionally, one of a kind to begin with. It has grown considerably since, from under 12 metres tall in 1910 to nearly 17 metres with a 19.5 metre crown spread by a 2005 measurement, though a butt-decaying fungus now regularly fruits on its trunk each autumn, a visible sign of age and decline rather than imminent death. The garden has already grafted a younger replacement, planted near the Terrace Garden in 1991, as insurance for whenever the original eventually goes.

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Frequently asked

What is the oldest tree in Cambridge?: The Milton Mulberry at Christ's College, grown from the root of a tree planted in 1608 or 1609. A 1795 storm uprooted the original, but it regrew from the same root rather than being replaced, and still fruits today.
Is Newton's apple tree in Cambridge real?: The Trinity College tree, planted in 1954, is a genuine graft from the actual apple tree at Newton's childhood home, Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, reputed to be the tree that inspired his theory of gravity. It is not the original tree, but it is a direct vegetative descendant of it.
Where did the plane tree at Jesus College come from?: A seed collected in 1802 at Thermopylae, Greece, the site of the ancient battle, by Jesus College fellow Edward Daniel Clarke during his travels. It was planted in the college's Fellows' Garden and now stands over 25 metres tall.
Is Cambridge University Botanic Garden free to visit?: No, the Botanic Garden charges admission, with free entry for University of Cambridge students, staff and card-carrying members. It is open daily except Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
More on the oldest tree: What is the oldest tree in Cambridge? The full answer, with map and directions.
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