What is the oldest tree in Charleston?
The oldest tree in Charleston is the Angel Oak, a southern live oak standing in a free city-owned park at 3688 Angel Oak Road on Johns Island, about twenty five minutes by car from downtown. The City of Charleston, which has owned the park since 1991, puts it at 300 to 400 years; an academic estimate cited by Wikipedia runs to 500. This page carries the union of the two, 300 to 500 years. The 1,500 year figure that appears on signs, postcards and merchandise around the city has no measurement behind it. A third tree, the Middleton Oak at Middleton Place, is sometimes quoted at 900 to 1,000 years, a figure repeated from account to account rather than measured; treat it the same way as the debunked 1,500-year claim for the Angel Oak, a number nobody has actually derived.
Nobody has counted the rings of the Angel Oak and nobody is going to. Live oak grows fast when young, slows at no reliable rate afterwards and hollows out from the centre while the tree is still healthy, so there is no continuous core to pull and no ring sequence to read. Every published age for it is an estimate built from size, which is how the city arrives at 300 to 400 years and an academic estimate reaches 500. The popular claim that goes with the 1,500 year figure, that this is the oldest living thing east of the Mississippi, does not survive checking either: bald cypress in the Carolinas have been dated by ring count well past a thousand years, one of them beyond 1,600. What is firm is everything that was actually measured. The trunk is 25 and a half feet round by the city's figure and 28 feet by another, the crown shades about 17,000 square feet, and the longest limb reaches 187 feet. The Cistern Yard stand downtown carries no age, because part of it was replanted after Hurricane Hugo.
One of Charleston's trees also appears in The Oldest Tree in Every City We Map.