Fort Worth's oldest dated tree once hid a fortune: pioneer Charles Turner buried about ten thousand dollars in gold under a live oak during the Civil War, and the oak still stands at roughly 235 years. Many of the others are remembered for what happened beside them: the 1849 trading post that became the town's first business, the inn where the mail and stagecoaches came in, an 1845 survey corner. Others are known by the tape measure, among them two national champions. Eighteen trees, most of them free to visit, with plenty of open questions for readers.
0 of 18 visited in Fort Worth
Jujube (Ziziphus jujuba) · Fort Worth Botanic Garden (Rock Springs section), Cultural District
The largest jujube on record in Texas is a Chinese fruit tree, and it stands about five metres off a road in Fort Worth. The Botanic Garden's champion runs to roughly 13.7 metres tall, which is a lot of height for a species usually kept as a squat orchard tree with the fruit inside a ladder's reach. Its trunk is 190 centimetres round. The Texas Big Tree Registry took that measurement in May 2020, and the regional tree trail that maps the garden's champions calls it the biggest of its kind recorded in the state.
Jujube has been grown in Chinese orchards for thousands of years and came to America as a crop rather than as an ornament. The fruit ripens green to a wrinkled red brown and eats like a dry apple, sweeter as it shrivels. Most people walking the corner of Old Garden Road and Rock Springs Road go past it without registering that they are looking at a state record, because it does not look like one: no buttressed trunk, no fence, no plaque doing the work for it.
Nobody has dated this tree and no source we can find has tried, so if you know when it went in, tell us. The garden charges 14 dollars for adults, which covers the whole grounds, and the champion trail passes several other record holders on the way round.
Texas Red Oak (Quercus buckleyi) · Park Hill, near TCU and Colonial Country Club
Its trunk is nearly two metres thick, and it grows on a strip of municipal grass beside a residential parkway. The Texas Red Oak on Ward Parkway measures 622 centimetres round, recorded by the Texas Big Tree Registry in July 2026, and the DFW National Champion Tree Trail lists it as stop two on a route of national title holders.
That size is the whole point. Texas red oak is a tree of limestone hills and canyon rims, a well shaped and fairly modest oak that people plant for its autumn colour rather than for bulk, and this one has grown to a girth the species is not supposed to reach. It did it in plain sight, in south Fort Worth between TCU and the Colonial Country Club, with no fence around it, no ticket, no visitor centre and nothing on the ground to tell you what you are standing under. The land is city owned and open in park hours. Traffic goes by four metres away.
Nobody has dated it. There is no ring count, no planting record and no growth figure for the species we would trust enough to work backwards from, so the age stays an open question rather than a number we made up. If you have seen one published, send it to us. The tape measure is the fact that holds, and at 622 centimetres it does not need any help.
Honey Mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa var. glandulosa) · Will Rogers Memorial Center, Cultural District
Texas ranchers spend real money bulldozing mesquite, and this one is a national champion. The honey mesquite on the Will Rogers Memorial Center grounds measures 478 centimetres round, taped by the Texas Big Tree Registry in June 2024; an ordinary mature mesquite rarely passes 200. The DFW National Champion Tree Trail names it the national champion of its species, and that crown is the trail's claim rather than a permanent title, because the American Forests register turns over and champions get dethroned. The trunk is not in dispute.
Mesquite is the tree Texas treats as a weed. It is thorny, crooked, deep rooted and almost impossible to kill, it takes over grazing land, it gets cleared by the acre, and then it ends up in the smoker giving brisket its flavour. Almost nothing is allowed to grow old. This one did, on city ground beside the halls where the Fort Worth Stock Show fills the complex every winter, watched by crowds who came for the livestock and walked past a record without looking up.
Nobody has recorded its age, and mesquite growth swings so hard with rainfall that a guess would be worth nothing. If you have seen a figure, tell us. It stands free and unfenced in the Cultural District, a short walk from the Botanic Garden.
Texas Ash (Fraxinus texensis) · 75-150 years · Near Sundance Square / downtown Fort Worth
Fort Worth pays to keep this one tree alive. In 2019 the city had the Texas Ash in Pioneers Rest Cemetery professionally injected against the emerald ash borer, the beetle that has been erasing ash trees across North America, with a commitment to come back and repeat the treatment every two or three years. That is an unusual amount of attention for a single ash, and it is the regional champion of its species, 213 centimetres round.
It grows in the oldest burial ground in the city, on Samuels Avenue, just over a kilometre northeast of downtown and walkable from it, among Fort Worth's earliest graves. The cemetery went onto the National Register of Historic Places in 2021. The ash stands over the kind of ground where the city's own beginning is written on the stones, and it is being kept going against a pest that has already killed hundreds of millions of its relatives.
Proof of life here is better than most: the Texas Big Tree Registry put a tape around this exact trunk in December 2025. Its age is unrecorded, and there is no growth figure for Texas ash we trust enough to work backwards from, so we leave it open rather than invent one.
The main gate is sometimes locked. There is a public entrance at the south end of the west fence, and daylight is the sensible time to go.
Texas Live Oak (Quercus fusiformis) · 235 years · Greenwood Memorial Park cemetery
About ten thousand dollars in gold spent the Civil War in the ground under this oak. Charles Turner, a farmer, merchant and Texas Ranger, opposed secession, yet he still paid to raise a Confederate volunteer company. Where he drew the line was his savings. He would not swap them for Confederate paper, so he buried the gold here, on his own farm, and waited.
When the war was over he dug it up and put it to work. The money helped the young city of Fort Worth pay its debts to northern creditors during Reconstruction, and the city counts Turner among its founders. His farm became Greenwood Memorial Park, and the oak is the first thing you meet inside the gate, standing in a traffic circle with two plaques at its feet. One tells the gold story. The other, from the Daughters of the American Revolution, names it a Bicentennial Tree, alive when the United States Constitution was signed.
That plaque is also the best evidence for its age. A 2009 record put the tree at about 220 years, which makes it somewhere around 235 now, and nobody holds a planting date to sharpen that. Gathering Growth taped it in 2021 at 427 centimetres round and 12 metres tall, with a crown about 18 metres across. It is an evergreen live oak, so it looks much the same in January as in July. Cars now circle the spot where a fortune once sat in the dirt.
Oak (Quercus sp.) · Traders Oak Park, north of downtown
Fort Worth's first lasting business opened under this oak, because the army would not let it any closer. When Camp Worth went up in 1849 on the bluffs where the West and Clear forks of the Trinity River meet, federal rules kept merchants at least a mile from the post. So Henry Clay Daggett and Archibald Franklin Leonard built a log trading post at a safe distance, among a stand of sprawling live oaks near Cold Springs.
It worked. Soldiers, settlers and Native Americans came to trade and to rest at the springs, and the store became the first successful business in Fort Worth. In 1850 the first election in what is now Tarrant County was held in front of it, and the voters chose Birdville as county seat. The county's first court sat inside. When the army abandoned the fort in 1853, the two traders moved their business up to an empty building on the bluffs.
The tree stayed where it was. The city's heritage register calls it perhaps the best-known tree in Fort Worth, says it has grown here for well over 200 years, and has it marking the spot where the trading post stood. What the register does not give is the species. The cabin went up among live oaks, but nobody has written down that this is one of them, so we list it simply as an oak. If you know which, tell us.
Texas Live Oak (Quercus fusiformis) · Trinity Park, Cultural District
This live oak keeps watch over the oldest building in Fort Worth still standing where it was built: the Van Zandt Cottage. The house belonged to Major Khleber Van Zandt, one of the most influential men in the city's early history, and the land around it was his too. His home and acreage took in ground that is now Trinity Park, the Fort Worth Botanic Garden and the Cultural District, so this whole corner of town, museums and gardens included, is one man's former property divided up.
The oak is the cottage's companion rather than its subject. The city's heritage register records it as a large live oak beside the house and says nothing about when it took root, so we cannot tell you whether the major sat under it, planted it or never gave it a thought. Nobody has dated it and nobody has published its girth. If you know either, tell us.
A second listed live oak grows about 80 metres to the east, in the small parking area off Farmhouse Way, so the two make an easy pair. The Botanic Garden, with its own champion trees, is a short walk south.
Texas Live Oak (Quercus fusiformis) · Trinity Park, Cultural District
For years this live oak was hidden behind a shed. A ramshackle storage building along Crestline Road blocked it from view; today the tree is the centrepiece of a small parking area off Farmhouse Way. It is an odd kind of promotion, from overlooked to the thing everyone parks around, but it means you can now see the whole of it.
It grows in Trinity Park, just east of the Van Zandt Cottage, on ground that belonged to Major Khleber Van Zandt, whose home and acreage once took in this park, the Botanic Garden next door and the Cultural District. The city's heritage register singles the tree out as a fine specimen. It gives no age and no measurements, so how big the trunk is remains for you to judge on the spot. If you bring a tape measure, tell us what you find, and if you know when it was planted, tell us that too.
Its neighbour at the cottage, the other listed live oak, is about 80 metres west, so both take five minutes.
Texas Live Oak (Quercus fusiformis) · Downtown Fort Worth
Fort Worth's official mail arrived, from 1856, at the spot where this live oak grows. Steele's Inn and Tavern stood here, it handled the town's official mail service, and it was the end of the line for the stagecoach between Fort Worth and Jacksboro.
That made it a waystation on a very long road. Passengers from the southern and eastern states stopped at the inn to rest before riding on to Jacksboro, where they could join the Butterfield Overland Stage, the route that carried them across the Southwest and on into California.
The inn is long gone and the oak remains, which is why the city's heritage register lists it. What the register does not say is how old the tree is, or whether it was already standing when the coaches pulled up. It would be easy to claim it watched them; nobody has shown that it did. If you know when it was planted, or have measured its trunk, tell us.
The Pioneers Rest ash is about a kilometre away and the Traders Oak another kilometre beyond it, so the three make a single morning's walk on the north side of downtown.
Texas Live Oak (Quercus fusiformis) · Greenwood Memorial Park cemetery
A live oak in a Fort Worth cemetery shades the graves of First World War airmen from the Royal Flying Corps. It stands over a group of Commonwealth War Graves in Greenwood Memorial Park, the resting place of pilots killed in training exercises in Tarrant County during the war.
They were trained fast and for dangerous work: taking aerial photographs of German positions and shooting down observation balloons, on as little as fifteen hours in biplanes. More than 1,500 pilots earned their wings in Fort Worth. The men under this tree died here, in training, thousands of kilometres from the war they were preparing for.
The same cemetery holds the Turner Oak, the oldest dated tree in the city, about 300 metres away by the main entrance. This one has no plaque about buried gold and no recorded age; the city's heritage register lists it for what it stands over rather than for its size, and gives no measurements. We also have no recent sighting of it beyond that register. If you visit, tell us it is still there and roughly how big it is.
Texas Live Oak (Quercus fusiformis) · Marion Sansom Park, above Lake Worth
Fort Worth's official register of heritage trees lists this live oak partly for the view and partly, with a straight face, for the stolen kisses it has watched. It grows at Inspiration Point in Marion Sansom Park and has looked out over Lake Worth, the register says, for generations.
Beside it stands an old rock shelter built by the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Depression-era work programme. Tree and shelter together are the reason to come: a wide view over the lake and the country around it, and a piece of the park's past within arm's reach.
What nobody has written down is the tree's age. "For generations" is the register's phrase, and we will not sharpen it into a number. Nor does the register give a girth or a height, or say whether the oak was already here when the shelter went up. If you have measured it, or know more about either of them, tell us.
Texas Live Oak (Quercus fusiformis) · Arrow S Park, west Fort Worth
This old live oak in Arrow S Park grows on what was once part of George T. Reynolds' ranch, and that ranch is where a whole string of places around it came from. Reynolds was one of the founders of the Reynolds Cattle Company, a name known on the range from Texas all the way up to Canada. Over time he gave away or sold parts of his land, and those pieces became Mosque Point, once called Reynolds Point, Camp Leroy Shuman, Amon Carter's Shady Oak Farm, Arrow S Park itself and more.
So the tree belongs to an expansive cattle ranch that turned, parcel by parcel, into ground other people could use. The city's heritage register calls it a great, old tree and leaves it at that: no age, no girth, no planting date. Whether it was already shading cattle when Reynolds owned the land is a reasonable guess and still only a guess. If you know more about it, or have put a tape round the trunk, tell us.
Texas Live Oak (Quercus fusiformis) · TCU campus
When Texas Christian University moved onto its permanent Fort Worth campus, it had exactly one tree, and the students had to bring it themselves. A small plaque in the turf, dedicated in 2011, says so: the only tree on the new campus was this live oak, transplanted "from the forest" by the class of 1912.
That class had reason to care. Fire had destroyed the university's former home in Waco, and they were the first students to graduate from the new grounds in Fort Worth. In the spring of 1912 they worked with the Texas Shade Tree Company to dig up a large live oak growing in woods near the campus and move it onto the site. This one took.
Everything else grew up around it. The campus is now thick with trees, and this is where they started. The Original Oak spreads its canopy across the middle of the grounds, just west of University Drive and northeast of Reed Hall.
Nobody has recorded its age. It was already a large tree when the seniors moved it in 1912, so it is well over a century old, and how much older is anyone's guess until somebody measures it. If you know its girth, tell us.
Chittamwood (Sideroxylon lanuginosum) · Cultural District
No chittamwood in the United States is bigger than this one. The city's heritage register records it as the largest of its kind in the country, a national champion of Sideroxylon lanuginosum, a tree that also goes by the name gum bumelia.
That is the whole of the record, and it is enough for a detour. The register gives no girth, no height and no age, so we cannot tell you how big the biggest one actually is, only that nobody has put a larger one on the books. If you have measured it, tell us.
It grows on the edge of the Botanic Garden and Trinity Park. The register does not say whether its spot falls inside the garden's paid grounds or on free park land, and we would like to know that too. Either way it sits in good company: the two Van Zandt live oaks are about 700 metres north, the Botanic Garden's record jujube about 500 metres west, and the Will Rogers mesquite, another national champion, a little over a kilometre away.
Pecan (Carya illinoinensis) · 200 years · Fort Worth Botanic Garden (Rock Springs section), Cultural District
By the city's own estimate this pecan is more than 200 years old, and Fort Worth's heritage register counts its visitors in layers. Native Americans came first. Then traders, before there were settlers to trade with. Then the pioneering families who built the town, and after them the tens of thousands who have walked through the Botanic Garden since.
It grows in the Rock Springs area of the garden, where the jujube that holds the Texas record for its species stands a couple of hundred metres away, so one ticket covers two listed trees.
The name is the register's, and it does not explain it, so we will not describe a hollow we have not seen. What the register does give is the estimate, and it is an honest one: over 200 years, with no upper figure and no measurement behind it that we know of. If you have taped the trunk, or know where the estimate came from, tell us.
Pecan (Carya illinoinensis) · 150 years · Quanah Parker Park, east Fort Worth
Size is why this pecan made Fort Worth's heritage register. It stands more than 85 feet tall, about 26 metres, and its trunk is more than 160 inches round, which is over four metres. The register gives its age as 150 years or more and singles out its shape as well.
Put those numbers beside the Turner Oak, the city's oldest dated tree, and the pecan holds its own: a trunk of roughly the same girth, on a tree about twice as tall. Where the oak spreads, the pecan climbs.
That is the whole of the record. It grows in Quanah Parker Park on the east side of the city, a long way from the other trees on this page, and the register says nothing about who planted it or what it has stood through, so neither will we. A tree that size is easy enough to find once you are in the park. If you know its story, or when it went in, tell us.
Post Oak (Quercus stellata) · Southeast Fort Worth
Road crews have come for this corner more than once, and every time the post oak has been left standing. Fort Worth's heritage register says the tree has been spared by roadwork on numerous occasions, and the proof is where it stands: directly behind a stop sign at a busy intersection, the kind of spot where trees usually lose.
The register also calls it ancient, likely one of the oldest trees in the whole city. It gives no figure, and we will not supply one. Without a core, a planting date or even a recorded girth, "one of the oldest" is as far as the evidence goes, and it is a strong enough claim from a city that also holds the Turner Oak.
We have no recent sighting of it beyond the register itself. If you pass it, tell us it is still there and how big it is, and if you know its age, tell us that too.
You see it from the street, which is the right way to see it: stay on the pavement and leave the gardens around it alone.
Bur Oak (Quercus macrocarpa) · 180 years · Forest Park
In 1845 a surveyor chose this bur oak to mark the land, and it is still here to be found. The E.S. Harris survey of that year used it as a witness tree: a living survey point, often fixed to establish a corner, so the line could be found again. Surveyors picked such trees for staying power, durable and slow to rot. Bur oak was a favourite, because it lives long and stands up to fire.
The reasoning held. The oak had a partner, a second witness tree from the same survey, which stood beside it until 2014, when it was removed after drought and the stresses that came with it. This one is still in Forest Park, more than 180 years after it went into the record.
That is also the floor for its age. It was standing in 1845, so it is at least 180 years old, and a tree chosen as a durable landmark was presumably no sapling even then. Nobody has put a firmer number on it. If you know its girth, tell us, and the range can get a top end.