In 2020 Toronto's city council voted to buy a private house on Coral Gable Drive, not to live in it, but to tear it down and save the oak growing beside it.
Ancient trees in Canada
Canada's mapped trees keep circling one epidemic. This page maps 27 remarkable trees across 4 cities in Canada, each one researched and verified. The oldest of them is Zhelevo, the Coral Gable Drive Red Oak in Toronto, at roughly 300 years.
Dutch elm disease killed roughly 22,000 of Montreal's American elms, and the Last Elm of Mont-Royal is one of the few left, a self-seeded survivor growing away from the streets where the disease moved fastest. Quebec City's Plains of Abraham lost most of its mature elms the same way and still keeps about 750 of them, monitored tree by tree against the fungus a century on, alongside wych elms, a European species growing beside the American ones. Toronto took a different route: in 2022 the city named an official tree for the first time, a 220-year-old red oak in Kew Gardens with a trunk 5.3 metres round. Montreal also holds a honey locust dated from a death recorded on the gravestone beside it, and a Japanese yew that grew fifteen metres wide instead of tall.
Every mapped city in Canada
1Ottawa8 trees · oldest roughly 125 years2Montreal7 trees · oldest roughly 200 years3Quebec City6 trees · oldest over 250 years4Toronto6 trees · oldest roughly 300 years
17 species grow in Canada
Oaks Northern Red Oak 7 · Pedunculate Oak 1
Elms and zelkovas American Elm 2 · Wych Elm 2
Limes Large-leaved Lime 'Vitifolia' 2 · Small-leaved Lime 1
Maples Silver Maple 1
Chestnuts, walnuts and hazels Horse Chestnut 1 · Turkish Hazel 1
Conifers Austrian Pine 1 · Ginkgo 1 · Japanese Yew 1 · Serbian Spruce 1
Fruit and blossom Ussurian Pear 1
More broadleaf trees American Yellowwood 1 · Crack Willow 1 · Honey Locust 1
The oldest tree mapped in Canada
See every city on the map, or open the map to find what is near you.