Houston does not do walks, and neither does this page. The city sprawls across seventeen hundred square kilometres and its oldest trees are scattered accordingly: a live oak with a forty metre crown in Spring Branch, the tallest winged elm in Texas, a pecan with a footpath named after it, a live oak in Klein a gas station nearly took down, a yaupon in a museum garden, a wide oak in Bellaire, and two old live oaks downtown. Eight trees, each worth the trip.
0 of 11 visited in Houston
Southern Live Oak (Quercus virginiana) · Spring Branch
The crown is the thing. Forty metres across, on a trunk 625 centimetres round and a tree only twenty three metres tall, which is the live oak habit taken to its conclusion: this species does not race upward, it spreads until the branches come back down to meet you. The Texas A&M Forest Service measured it in March 2026, so those are current numbers rather than remembered ones.
It stands on the front lawn of a Presbyterian church on Gessner Road, in a part of Spring Branch that was farmland when the congregation broke ground in 1961. The church's own history mentions picnics held under the big trees at the front of the property, which is roughly what a tree this shape is for.
No age has been published. Live oaks are difficult to date without coring and nobody appears to have done it. What can be said is that a live oak reaching six metres of girth in a climate like this one has had a long time and a lot of water, and that it was clearly here before the church was.
The grounds are open, and a churchyard has never been a bad place to stand and look up.
Yaupon Holly (Ilex vomitoria) · River Oaks
Texas keeps a champion register for its biggest trees, and this entry is a plant most of the South clips into a hedge. Yaupon holly usually grows as a dense evergreen shrub. The one in the gardens at Rienzi has gone up like a tree: just over nine metres tall, a crown spreading nearly as wide, and a trunk 91 centimetres round, which is enough for state champion class on the Texas A&M Forest Service's registry. Foresters taped it in August 2024, which makes it one of the freshest measurements on this map.
The four acres it grows in belong to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The Houston Chronicle's Azalea Trail coverage describes the garden's yaupons as part of its evergreen structure, the quiet green that holds the place together while everything else takes its turn flowering. Walking the garden costs nothing and needs no reservation, though the whole property shuts for the month of August.
Two things we cannot tell you. Only the state registry names this particular plant, so it sits flagged here until a second source catches up with it. And nobody has dated it: yaupon gets measured for girth far more often than for years, and no growth rate we would trust for the species turned up. If you know how long it has been standing there, tell us.
Mexican White Oak (Quercus polymorpha) · Bellaire
This oak is broader than it is tall. The Texas A&M Forest Service put its crown at 19.8 metres across against 18.9 metres of height, taped the trunk at 2.31 metres round, and rated its condition good.
It grows in Russ Pitman Park in Bellaire, a separate city sitting inside Houston's West Loop. Both the park's own pages and the City of Bellaire's describe the place by its towering oaks, in the plural, without picking one out. The state registry did pick one out, and this is it: a Mexican white oak, Quercus polymorpha, also known as the Monterrey oak, which is not the species you expect to find carrying a state measurement in a Texas suburb.
The park is public and free, open from five in the morning until half past nine at night, with the Nature Discovery Center inside it keeping its own shorter hours. The tree is reachable whenever the park is, which is most of the day.
Two gaps worth saying out loud. The registry's tape went round it in May 2020, so the figures above are five years old and read as a floor rather than a reading; nothing we found suggests it has come down or gone into decline. And no age exists for it anywhere, with no growth rate for this species we would trust to derive one from the girth. If you know when it was planted, tell us.
Southern Live Oak (Quercus virginiana) · 250-300 years · Downtown
Houston is younger than this tree, probably by the better part of a century. The Heritage Society, which manages Sam Houston Park, puts the oak at 250 to 300 years old. That is an arborist's estimate rather than a ring count, and nobody has published a girth to check it against, but even the low end has it growing here before the city was founded in 1836.
It is a southern live oak grown the way the species grows when it is left alone: sprawling rather than tall, with massive limbs that reach out and then down until they nearly meet the ground. The towers of downtown stand a few blocks away. The oak was already old when the frontier town became a cotton port, and older still when the oil money arrived and built the skyline behind it.
The name is recent. The society called it Jane Ellen's Tree, after Jane Ellen, its first female executive director, so it honours the person who looked after the ground rather than anyone who owned it.
Do not confuse it with the other live oak that made the news in this park. In February 2026 Trees for Houston planted its one-millionth tree here, a young live oak beside the Kellum-Noble House. It has a long future ahead of it. This one has the past.
Our pin marks the park, not the trunk, so expect to look around. Look for the limbs that come down to meet you.
Southern Live Oak (Quercus virginiana) · 400 years · Downtown
The most famous thing about this oak is a story nobody can document. For years a plaque near the corner of Capitol and Bagby said that eleven criminals were hanged from its limbs while Texas was an independent republic, between 1836 and 1845. The plaque has since gone, and the story has not held up well without it. The Houston Press calls it uncertain. The Houston Chronicle has called the tree's grim reputation false. And the executions that a 1913 history of the city by Dr S.O. Young does record, three of them according to the Press, are tied to a different tree altogether, in Freedmans Town.
What remains is the oak itself, which is the better story anyway. It is a southern live oak usually described as roughly 400 years old. Nobody has published a ring count or even a girth, so treat that as a figure the city repeats rather than one anybody measured. It is old; exactly how old is an open question.
It has stood through all of downtown Houston's history without the courtesy of a park around it. It stands on the public sidewalk across the street from Bayou Place, and the City of Houston's Civic Center Department keeps it alive there.
Our pin is an estimate of the corner, not the trunk, so check which tree you are looking at. And if you have a tape measure, the girth would settle more than the plaque ever did.
Southern Live Oak (Quercus virginiana) · 400 years · Uptown / Galleria
Most restaurants buy land for the parking. The owners of this Becks Prime bought theirs in 1988, by a local news account, mainly for the trees. Two live oaks stand behind the building on Augusta Drive, each reported at about 70 feet tall, and the Heritage Society, Houston's history museum, estimates the oak it names at 400 to 500 years old. Another account has them sprouting around the 1620s. Neither figure comes with a ring count or a girth, so read both as estimates. Even the low end has these oaks standing well before Houston was founded in 1836.
What makes them worth the detour is what the restaurant did around them. Their lower limbs had sunk until they rested on the ground, so a 210-ton crane lifted them back up onto wooden stilts, which still hold them today. The building is said to float 18 inches above the soil to keep its weight off the roots, and the drive-through lane that runs under the canopy is laid in pavers set by hand.
The sources do not agree on the count. The Heritage Society speaks of one oak, the local report of two colossal ones. Stand on the patio and count for yourself.
These are a business's grounds, not a park, so come while the restaurant is open. Our pin marks the address rather than the trunks.
Southern Live Oak (Quercus virginiana) · 100-200 years · Old Sixth Ward / Washington Ave
The puzzle of this oak is where it stands: in a narrow walkway between graves, halfway up a slope at the back of Glenwood Cemetery. Planting a live oak in a path that skinny would be an odd choice, which is why historians quoted by the Houston Chronicle in 2010 suspected the tree was here first, growing on its own before anyone was buried around it. If they are right, every grave in that row arrived after the oak did.
Glenwood itself calls it perhaps its most notable tree, aptly named The Cemetery Oak, and that is saying something. The same grounds hold two Harris County champion trees, a mockernut hickory on East Avenue and an eastern red cedar in Section C-3, and the cemetery still puts the oak above both.
Its age is an estimate. In the Chronicle's account a landscape architect put it at about 130 years, judging from its size and from a 1930 aerial photograph, which would start it around 1880. A 2013 photo caption says only well over a hundred years. Take a century to two as the honest band. The same piece described the trunk as wide as a Volkswagen, but nobody has published a tape measurement we could check.
Our pin marks the cemetery, not the tree, and the grounds cover 88 acres. Head for the back and look halfway up the slope. If you measure the girth, tell us.
American Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis) · Memorial Park / Memorial
The claim attached to this sycamore is a rumour, and we are keeping it one. Houstonia magazine's 2022 guide to the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center describes a leviathan sycamore on the Ravine Trail, rumored to be the oldest of its species in Harris County. Rumored is the magazine's word, and it is ours too. We have found no register entry, no measurement and no ring count behind it, and the arboretum's own trail pages do not mention this tree at all.
What is not in doubt is where to look. The Ravine Trail runs through the northwest corner of the arboretum, crossing a water-filled ravine on a series of bridges, and the big trees along it are seen from the boardwalk. The arboretum is free to enter, so the only cost of checking the rumour for yourself is the parking.
One caution before you decide you have found it. The arboretum's own pages say sycamores also grow tall on the Couch Birding Trail, so a big sycamore elsewhere in the grounds is not necessarily this one. The one the magazine meant is on the Ravine Trail.
Nobody has published its age, its girth or its height. If you go with a tape measure, take the trunk's circumference at chest height and tell us; it is the quickest way to find out whether the rumour stands up. Our pin marks the arboretum entrance, not the tree, and the ravine may be several hundred metres from it.
A day trip away
Sugar Land, 25 km south-west
Pecan (Carya illinoinensis) · Sugar Land, Fort Bend County
There is a footpath in Sugar Land called Old Pecan Tree Trail, and it is named after exactly what you would hope. The tree is a pecan of 467 centimetres round and twenty eight metres tall, with a crown spreading twenty five metres, measured by the Texas A&M Forest Service in March 2026. Trail guides rank it among the twenty five largest trees in Texas, which is scored on trunk, height and crown together.
Pecan is the state tree, and it is one of the few state trees anywhere chosen for something other than looks: it feeds people. A tree this size drops a serious crop, and in a good year the ground beneath it is worth walking slowly across in October.
The trail is short, well under a kilometre, and the tree is the reason it exists. That is the useful thing about a path named for a tree: nobody has to explain where to go.
No age has been recorded. Pecans of this girth in the Brazos bottomlands are generally reckoned in centuries rather than decades, but nobody has counted the rings and this page is not going to guess.
Klein, 31 km north
Southern Live Oak (Quercus virginiana) · 180-300 years · Klein, Harris County
Herman Strack landed at Galveston in 1848, a blacksmith out of Prussia and the first of five brothers to settle north Harris County. Family records put his homestead and forge at this tree. It got its name from what happened under it afterwards: couples met here, and a good number of proposals were made in its shade.
Everything else the Stracks built is gone. When the family restaurant closed in 2014 a developer bought the land for a Circle K, and the tree stood where the forecourt entrance needed to be. That was very nearly the end of it. Students at Klein Oaks High School ran a letter-writing campaign, Circle K eventually pledged to keep the tree, and three years later the Texas A&M Forest Service made it a Famous Tree of Texas.
So it is a live oak hung with Spanish moss on a patch of grass behind a filling station, and it is the last physical trace of a settlement that gave the whole district its name. Nobody has dated it. It was already the tree everyone met at in 1848, which puts a floor under the number if not a ceiling.
Spring Creek Greenway, 33 km north-east
Winged Elm (Ulmus alata) · Spring Creek Greenway
This is the largest winged elm recorded in Texas, and it is not a large tree. The trunk is 279 centimetres round, which for the species is remarkable and for this page is modest. Champion status is scored on trunk, height and crown added together, and where this tree wins is height: thirty metres, which is tall for an elm that usually tops out well short of that, with a twenty four metre crown above it.
Winged elm gets its name from the corky ridges that run down either side of the younger twigs, wide enough to look deliberate. On a tree this old you will find them out at the ends of the branches rather than on the trunk, so it is worth picking up a fallen twig.
It stands on the Spring Creek Greenway, a long ribbon of bottomland forest that Harris County has been stitching together along the creek for years, and which is one of the largest urban forested corridors in the country. The Forest Service measured the tree in December 2025.
No age is recorded. Winged elm is not a long-lived species, so this one is old for its kind rather than old in the way an oak is old.