Welcher ist der älteste Baum in Philadelphia?

The date rests on a specific claim rather than a general one. In 1785, William Hamilton of The Woodlands shipped three ginkgo saplings from London, the first of their kind to reach North America. He kept two at his own estate and gave the third to his friend William Bartram, whose garden on the Schuylkill was already the oldest botanic garden on the continent. Both of Hamilton's trees were cut down in the 1980s, leaving Bartram's the sole survivor and the oldest ginkgo known in the country. It is a male tree, sparing the garden the foul-smelling seed ginkgoes are known for. The garden is free, open every day, dawn to dusk, a 10 minute walk from the Woodland Avenue trolley. Three more trees stand across town at Morris Arboretum, a paid garden: a Bender Oak hybrid nobody bred, possibly close to the ginkgo's own age; a katsura whose autumn leaves smell of brown sugar; and a weeping hemlock, moved to its current spot in 1947, that outlived a 2024 storm which killed its twin by the pond.