New York City runs a government registry for this: the Parks Department's Great Trees of New York City list, started in 1985 and expanded in 2024 after a nomination drive drew more than 270 submissions. Every tree carries that designation. The five boroughs each hold at least one, deliberately: a courthouse elm and a botanical garden's tallest oak get the same paragraph as a tulip tree growing wild in a park tied to the Dutch colony's earliest land deals. Some are colonial-era survivors; one was planted so a park would have something to be famous for.
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Photo : Marty Aligata (Msact) (CC BY-SA 4.0)
1
The Hangman's Elm
English Elm (Ulmus procera) · 300-346 years (age estimates vary) · Greenwich Village, Manhattan
This elm is one of the oldest living things on Manhattan Island, and almost everything colorful ever said about it is unproven. Its nickname comes from a folk legend that traitors and criminals were hanged from its branches during and after the American Revolution, a story with no supporting court or newspaper record; the earliest known references to it as a hanging tree only appear in print in the late 19th century, generations after the events they describe. What is documented is its age: the New York City Parks Department measured it at 310 years old in 1989, later revising that to a more cautious more than 300 years, with some accounts pushing the figure to 346. It stands at the northwest corner of Washington Square, a plot of land that served as a potter's field and public execution ground in the early 1800s, close enough to the tree that a real 1820 hanging nearby, of Rose Butler for arson, may be the seed of fact the legend grew from. The tree survived a 2012 park renovation that construction crews came close to damaging.
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2
The Black Tupelo of the Ramble
Black Tupelo (Nyssa sylvatica) · about 168 years · Upper West Side, Manhattan
Central Park has two competing claimants for its oldest tree, and this one has the better paperwork. A London plane near the Reservoir might date to 1862, when the Reservoir itself was excavated, but this black tupelo in the Ramble, the deliberately wild, maze-like woodland Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed into the park's plan, has documentation placing its planting at 1858, four years earlier, during the park's original construction. Black tupelos are native to eastern North American wetlands and swamps, not the schist bedrock Central Park sits on, which makes this a planted specimen rather than a survivor of the farmland and settlements the park displaced. The species is prized by ecologists for its brilliant, early scarlet fall color and by foresters for its resistance to rot, qualities that have let this tree outlast most of the park's original 1850s plantings. It stands in one of the Ramble's quieter, less trafficked paths, a 19th century engineering project that has spent a century and a half looking convincingly unplanned.
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Photo : Garry R. Osgood (CC BY-SA 2.0)
3
The Camperdown Elm
Camperdown Elm (Ulmus glabra 'Camperdownii') · about 154 years · Prospect Park, Brooklyn
Every Camperdown elm on Earth is a clone, and this one is among the oldest. The cultivar began in the 1830s when a gardener for the Earl of Camperdown found a single mutant elm branch, contorted and weeping instead of growing upright, on the Camperdown House estate near Dundee, Scotland. Because the mutation cannot be grown from seed, every specimen since has been propagated by grafting a cutting onto a straight-trunked host, which makes each Camperdown elm in the world a genetic twin of that one Scottish branch. This graft was planted near Prospect Park's Boathouse in 1872, a gift to the young park, and by the 1960s had declined badly enough that Brooklyn nearly lost it, until the poet Marianne Moore, a devoted Prospect Park visitor, wrote publicly in its defense and helped rally the conservation campaign that saved it. She later called it Brooklyn's crowning curio. Its low, twisted canopy, propped and cabled for support, still spreads wide enough that visitors duck to walk beneath it, a shape no other tree in the park shares by nature.
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Photo : Marty Aligata (CC BY-SA 3.0)
4
The Sassafras of Green-Wood
Sassafras (Sassafras albidum) · possibly pre-1838, precise age unconfirmed · Greenwood Heights, Brooklyn
Green-Wood Cemetery has counted this as its oldest tree, possibly older than the cemetery itself, which was founded in 1838 on rolling glacial hills chosen specifically because the terrain already supported mature, established woodland. Sassafras trees rarely reach the size or age this specimen has, since the species usually grows as a smaller understory tree that spreads through root suckers rather than living to great individual age; this one, or rather these two, since it appears as a pair of trunks a few feet apart, may be the last survivors of a larger colonial root system that once covered more ground. Nobody has cored the tree to confirm an exact age, and Green-Wood's own arborists are candid that the favorable growing conditions inside a manicured 478 acre cemetery likely inflate its size relative to a wild sassafras of the same age, making size an unreliable proxy for years here. What is certain is that it predates most of the 600,000 people buried around it, a rare case of a cemetery's oldest resident having no grave at all.
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Photo : Bruce Schaff (CC BY-SA 4.0)
5
The Queens Giant
Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) · 350-450 years · Douglaston, Queens
This tree was already centuries old when New Amsterdam was still a Dutch trading post, and unlike almost everything else on this list, nobody planted it. At 133.8 feet the Queens Giant is the tallest carefully measured tree in New York City, a tulip poplar growing wild in a stretch of Alley Pond Park's forest that has never been cleared, and the New York City Parks Department dates it to at least 368 years old, with other estimates ranging as wide as 350 to 450. Tulip trees can live 600 years and reach over 150 feet under ideal conditions, and this specimen's height alone marks it as one of the oldest living things in the entire New York metropolitan region, likely older than any building, monument or institution in the five boroughs. Some local histories connect the surrounding land to 17th century transactions between the Dutch West India Company and the Matinecock people who lived here before European settlement, though no source confirms this specific tree witnessed any documented exchange. It has simply kept growing, in a park most of the city drives past on the Long Island Expressway without knowing it is there.
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6
The Manchurian Linden of Kissena Park
Manchurian Linden (Tilia mandshurica) · approximately 120-150 years (exact planting date unconfirmed) · Flushing, Queens
This linden is a leftover from a 19th century nursery business rather than a park planting, standing 75 feet north of a restroom next to Kissena Park's tennis courts on land that was once part of Samuel Bowne Parsons's commercial tree nursery. Parsons, whose family also planted Manhattan's Hangman's Elm-era Washington Square trees and much of Central Park's original stock, ran one of the era's most important import operations from this site starting in the 1870s, bringing Japanese maples to America for the first time and propagating rhododendrons at commercial scale. After Parsons died in 1906, the city absorbed part of his former grove into what became Kissena Park, and this Manchurian linden, a species native to forests spanning China, Korea and Russia's far east, is one of more than 100 imported tree varieties that trace back to the original nursery grounds still growing in the park today. It carries Great Tree status as a living fragment of Flushing's forgotten reputation as America's premier 19th century horticultural center, a history most visitors to the tennis courts beside it have no reason to suspect.
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7
The Clove Lakes Colossus
Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) · over 300 years · Sunnyside, Staten Island
Staten Island's tallest tree stands 119 feet, more than 14 feet shorter than Queens' record-holding tulip tree, but old enough on its own terms to anchor the north end of Clove Lakes Park, easily found along a paved path where its trunk, 21.4 feet around, dwarfs everything nearby. Tulip trees like this one are among the tallest native hardwoods in eastern North America, capable of shooting straight up through a forest canopy in search of light rather than spreading wide the way an open-grown oak would, which is part of why the species so often produces the height records claimed on lists like this one. Clove Lakes Park itself preserves one of Staten Island's last stretches of the mixed hardwood forest that once covered most of the borough before 20th century development, and the Colossus, reported at well over 300 years old, would have been an established mature tree when the surrounding land was still farmland rather than parkland. It remains one of Staten Island's contributions to New York City's official Great Trees registry, one of ten entries from the least visited of the five boroughs.
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8
The Yew of Hero Park
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · about 106 years · Grymes Hill, Staten Island
This yew is one of 144 evergreens planted in 1920 around a glacial boulder called Sugar Loaf Rock, each tree standing as a living memorial to a Staten Island resident killed in the First World War. A plaque at the boulder names every soldier the grove commemorates, making Hero Park one of the more literal war memorials in New York City: not statues or a wall of names alone, but a planted forest where each individual tree corresponds to an individual death, a practice with a documented precedent in similar WWI memorial tree plantings elsewhere in the country around the same period. European yews are exceptionally long lived and slow growing, a species choice that all but guaranteed this planting would still be standing a century later, evergreen through every winter since 1920 the way the soldiers it honors never got to see. At just over a century old it is younger than most other trees on this list, but its age is not really the point; the grove was planted to hold a specific memory in place, and a century on, it still does.
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9
The Red Oak of the Thain Family Forest
Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) · 150-200 years · Bronx Park
This oak grows in the middle of the Spicebush Trail inside the Thain Family Forest, a 50 acre stretch of the New York Botanical Garden that has never been logged and represents the largest surviving remnant of the woodland that once covered most of New York City before European colonization. The Botanical Garden was deliberately sited here in 1895 specifically because this forest already existed, a decision that preserved a functioning fragment of pre-colonial Lenapehoking rather than planting a garden from scratch. At a trunk diameter over five feet, this red oak, designated a Great Tree in 2024, ranks among the largest and most accessible specimens in a forest that also holds tulip trees, sweetgums, hemlocks and beeches estimated at up to 300 years old in less visited sections. Red oaks support more moth and butterfly species as larval hosts than almost any other tree genus in the northeastern United States, more than 400 by some counts, making this single oak a small ecosystem of its own even before accounting for its age or size.
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10
The Red Horse Chestnut of Van Cortlandt House
Red Horse Chestnut (Aesculus x carnea) · over 100 years (precise planting date unconfirmed) · Van Cortlandt Park, Bronx
This tree grows on the east lawn of the Van Cortlandt House, built in 1748 and the oldest building still standing in the Bronx, and local tradition holds that a member of the Van Cortlandt family planted it themselves, though no source confirms exactly when. Red horse chestnuts are themselves a hybrid, a cross between the European horse chestnut and a red-flowered American buckeye species, bred for ornamental gardens rather than found in the wild, which means whoever planted this one chose it deliberately for its spring flowers rather than letting it seed in naturally. At nearly 88 feet tall with a trunk over three feet across, it has grown large enough to be one of three horse chestnuts at the house included in the NYC Parks Great Trees registry, all three now part of a Great Tree Clone Program in which cuttings are propagated and planted at new sites around the city, extending the genetic line of trees like this one even as the originals eventually age out. Van Cortlandt House operated as a Revolutionary War-era headquarters at times for both American and British forces, meaning this tree, whatever its precise age, grows on ground that has seen the city's founding conflict up close.
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11
The Great Elm of Central Park West
American Elm (Ulmus americana) · long-established, exact planting date undocumented · Upper West Side, Manhattan
Central Park once had roughly 500 American elms along its western edge. By 1985, a New York Times survey counted 23 left, and this is one of them. It stands right at the park's edge on Central Park West and 77th Street, directly across from the American Museum of Natural History, wider than it is tall: NYC Parks measures it at just under 51 feet high with a 55 foot canopy.
Dutch elm disease reached New York in the 1930s and worked through the city for decades, killing elms faster than anyone could replant them. This one kept standing while its neighbours came down one by one, close enough to the street that passersby now call it, without much competition, the most beautiful tree on the block.
Nobody has dated it precisely. What is documented is its survival: officially designated one of the city's Great Trees, standing beside a statue of Alexander von Humboldt, who spent his career cataloguing exactly this kind of specimen. No planting record narrows the guess further than a century or more, so that wide range is what the story states rather than a false precise number.
Walk in from the Museum of Natural History subway stop and it is the first tree inside the park, an entrance marker planted long before anyone thought to protect it.
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12
The Elms on the Rocks
American Elm (Ulmus americana) · long-established, exact planting date undocumented · Central Park (Mall/Literary Walk area), Manhattan
Two American elms grow straight out of exposed bedrock east of Central Park's Mall, their roots spread flat across the rock like something poured rather than planted. NYC Parks designates them as two separate Great Trees, ids 38 and 39, but they stand close enough on the same outcrop that almost nobody visits one without the other.
The rock underneath predates both trees by a margin that makes their own age beside the point. This is Manhattan schist, some of it dated by geologists at over a billion years old, exposed here by the same nineteenth century landscaping that shaped the rest of the park. The trees carry no planting record of their own, each roughly 78 feet tall, trunks gnarled from decades of finding purchase where there is barely any soil to root in.
What they prove is less about age than persistence. An elm in open parkland can be felled by disease or storm in a season. One growing out of solid rock has already solved a harder problem, and its awkward, rock gripping shape is the visible record of that fight.
They sit a few hundred metres from the Mall's elm allee and about 600 metres from the Ramble, an easy stop on the same walk through the park's oldest plantings.
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13
The Elm Allee of Literary Walk
American Elm (Ulmus americana) · about 100 years (planted in the 1920s, the third planting on this site) · Central Park (Mall/Literary Walk), Manhattan
Central Park's most photographed avenue of trees is not the original one. The Mall, also called Literary Walk, has been replanted with American elms twice before the row standing today: the first two plantings failed when foot traffic compacted the soil around the roots, and the elms there now went in during the 1920s, the third attempt, protected from the start by low fencing along the path.
That makes these trees roughly a century old, not the century and a half some press coverage implies by counting from the park's 1858 design. NYC Parks lists the grove as an official Great Tree, and it is often called the largest grove of American elms in the world, a claim the park's own conservancy states more carefully: one of the largest remaining plantations of a species that Dutch elm disease has been cutting down, city-wide, since the 1930s. Central Park still holds about 1,600 elms, several hundred on a rotating fungicide programme, and still loses 15 to 30 a year to the same disease that ended the first two plantings here by other means.
Walk the Mall in full leaf and it reads as a cathedral aisle, two unbroken rows meeting overhead. Every one of them is a replacement, and every one of them is still, by the numbers, worth the trip.
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14
The Second Camperdown Elm of Green-Wood
Camperdown Elm (Ulmus glabra 'Camperdownii') · believed 19th or early 20th century planting, exact date unconfirmed · Greenwood Heights, Brooklyn
Brooklyn has two Camperdown elms, and genetically they are the same tree. Every Camperdown elm alive is a graft from one contorted branch found on a Scottish estate near Dundee in the 1830s, a mutation that cannot be grown from seed, so each specimen is a cutting of a cutting of that single original. The famous one stands behind the Boathouse in Prospect Park, planted in 1872. This one grows two miles south, inside Green-Wood, where Garden Path meets Pink Avenue.
Nobody wrote down when it went in. New York's Great Trees register named it in 1985 and recorded the species and the corner, not a date, and no later source has supplied one. What the sources do agree on is the order: this is the younger of the two, and old enough to be counted among Green-Wood's landmark trees. A precise year would have to be invented, so there is none here.
The shape carries it anyway. Camperdowns arch their limbs downward and tangle them into one another instead of reaching up, which makes a low dome you duck into rather than stand under, dark inside even at midday. Victorian day-trippers came out to this cemetery in numbers that helped make the public case for Brooklyn's parks, and they came for exactly this: a landscape with curiosities in it. Green-Wood is free and open daily, and the R train stops at the gate.
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15
The Kansas Hawthorn of the Lily Pool
Kansas Hawthorn (Crataegus coccinioides) · about 114 years (planted 1912) · Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
The largest Kansas hawthorn in the United States grows in Brooklyn, and the species normally gives up at around twenty feet. This one reached 35, on a 20 inch trunk under a 28 foot crown, and in 1985 the American Forestry Association named it a national champion. New York State has carried it on its Big Tree Register since 2009 as one of only two champion trees in the five boroughs. None of that was the plan. Rochester's parks department sent it down as a gift in 1912, and it was planted across from the Lily Pool at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which had opened to the public only a year or so before. It has stood there through everything the garden has become since.
Crataegus coccinioides is a hawthorn of the American Midwest, a thorny, unfashionable small tree that most visitors walk past for eleven months of the year. October is the exception, when the leaves go scarlet and orange and the branches hang with dark crimson haws.
Entry to the Garden is paid. The pin here sits at the Washington Avenue gate rather than at the tree, because no survey has recorded its coordinates: walk to the Lily Pool by the conservatory and look for the small tree carrying an unreasonable amount of fruit.
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16
The Caucasian Wingnut of the Rock Garden
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · about 104 years (received 1922) · Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
This tree came from Rome in 1922, and one of its limbs now rests on a crutch. The Caucasian wingnut on the Flatbush Avenue side of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, just north of the Rock Garden, has grown heavy enough that the garden props and cables its lower branches to stop them tearing out of the trunk. That trunk is the argument: the Garden calls it nearly nine feet through, the city's Great Trees register measures ten, and the two figures have never been reconciled. It stands about 60 feet tall and close to as wide, with roots surfacing in long ridged patterns that run out from the base across the ground.
Pterocarya fraxinifolia comes from the wet forests between the Black Sea and northern Iran and reached European gardens in 1782, which is how an Italian nursery came to have one to send. The name is literal. In midsummer the tree hangs chains of small winged nutlets a foot and a half long from its branch tips, green ropes that stay up, browning, into autumn, and nothing else in the garden does anything like it. A clone of it went in near the Herb Garden in 1978, and the difference in size between the two makes the case for coming to see this one.
Entry to the Garden is paid, and the pin sits at the main gate: the tree is a walk away, along the Flatbush Avenue boundary.
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17
The Cedar of Lebanon Grove near Conservatory Water
Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) · not documented · Central Park, Manhattan
Central Park's own Conservancy calls this a single cedar of Lebanon. A blogger who found the same spot in 2016 counted several, growing together as a small grove, both describing the identical trees just inside the park's 72nd Street entrance, behind the information kiosk near Conservatory Water. Nobody has resolved the discrepancy, and this project would rather say so than guess. What both sources agree on is the plaque at the base, dedicating the planting for grandchildren, a gift from patrons Linda and Mort Janklow, and the species itself: Cedrus libani, the tree on Lebanon's flag and, in the older stories, the timber said to have built Solomon's Temple. It is evergreen where almost everything else in this part of Central Park is not, a pyramidal, blue green shape that holds its form across every season rather than only one. Its cones grow upright on the branch instead of hanging, ripening through autumn into rows that look, from a distance, like eggs balanced along each limb. No planting date survives for this grove; a 2016 estimate guesses a few decades old for Central Park's cedars generally, honest but not a measurement of this specific planting. Conservatory Water sits a five minute walk from three of this walk's other trees, the closest addition this cluster has had.
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18
The American Elm at the East 97th Street Entrance
American Elm (Ulmus americana) · not documented, dates to the 1800s · Central Park, Manhattan
Most of New York's elms are gone. Dutch elm disease arrived in the 1930s and by the postwar decades had killed the overwhelming majority of the American elms that once shaded nearly every street in the city, a loss so total that Central Park's surviving giants now register as minor miracles rather than ordinary trees. This one stands at the park's East 97th Street entrance, its northernmost officially designated Great Tree, an eighty foot canopy spread wide enough to be one of the broadest in the entire register, and a trunk the tree guides describe, not unkindly, as looking like an old witch, its serpentine branches twisting rather than reaching straight up. Nobody recorded when it was planted; city records only say the 1800s, a stretch of a century or more that leaves its exact age an open question. What is documented is what it survived: the fungus that erased its species from most of the city, and, per the park's own account, the storms that have since taken out other Central Park trees around it. New York designated it a Great Tree in 1985, one of the original class, decades before the citywide relaunch that added scores more in 2024. Walk in from Fifth Avenue at 97th Street and it is the first thing waiting.
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19
The London Plane of the Reservoir
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · not documented, possibly planted around 1862 · Central Park, Manhattan
A tree with more than one trunk is hard to age by the usual rule of thumb, and that uncertainty is most of this one's story. The London plane on the Bridle Path near East 96th Street rises just over ninety six feet from a base that splits into multiple trunks fused so thoroughly that its combined diameter tops five feet, bark mottled in patches of green, tan and grey that one NYC Parks writer compared to an impressionist canvas. The claim attached to it, that it was planted around 1862 when the Reservoir beside it was first excavated, comes from one nature writer's educated guess rather than any planting record, which makes 'possibly the oldest tree in Central Park' a title worth repeating with the word possibly intact. A rival candidate exists across the park: a black tupelo in the Ramble that one book on the city's great trees dates to 1858, four years earlier, an argument nobody has settled because neither tree came with a receipt. What is not in dispute is the setting. The Reservoir's running path carries thousands of people past this trunk every week, most looking at the water and the skyline reflected in it rather than down at the multi-trunked plane that has, by the most generous reading, watched the water since before the Civil War.
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20
The Yoshino Cherries of the Reservoir
Yoshino Cherry (Prunus x yedoensis) · not documented; the planting traces to a 1912 gift from Japan · Central Park, Manhattan
Everyone knows Washington's cherry trees came from Japan in 1912. Fewer know New York got a gift the same year: a planting of Yoshino cherries along the Reservoir's east side, sent alongside the 3,020 trees that went to the Tidal Basin and somehow left out of the story that made the capital famous for its blossoms. Thirty five trees stand there today, city designated as a single Great Tree entry rather than thirty five separate ones, which is the honest way to register a planting nobody experiences tree by tree. They bloom white shading to pale pink each April, usually a week or two before the Reservoir's showier Kwanzan cherries on the opposite bank, and the flowers carry a faint almond scent the plum colored Kwanzans do not. Here is the part no one advertises: Yoshino cherries rarely live past sixty years even with good care, and nothing in the historical record says whether the trees blooming today grew from the original 1912 shipment or replaced it at some point since, the way Washington's own planting has been replanted in stages for a century. So the honest claim is not that these particular trunks are old. It is that this exact stretch of path has carried the same seasonal show, on the same imported species, since Woodrow Wilson's first year in the White House.
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