What is the oldest tree in Houston?
The oldest tree around Houston is almost certainly the Kissing Tree at Klein, a live oak that Strack family records place at the site of Herman Strack's homestead and blacksmith shop, settled in 1848, and which was already the meeting tree for the settlement then. Nobody has put a firm number of years on it. The largest is a different tree: a live oak on the lawn of John Knox Presbyterian Church in Spring Branch, measured in March 2026 at 625 centimetres round and twenty three metres tall, with a crown spreading forty metres. Neither is in central Houston. Downtown has two old live oaks, Jane Ellen's Tree in Sam Houston Park and the Old Hanging Oak on Capitol Street, credited with 250 to 400 years, but those ages are estimates that nobody has measured.
Measurements here come from the Texas Big Tree Registry, kept by the Texas A&M Forest Service, which records circumference, height and crown spread with the date each was taken. That is unusually good for a tree register, which is why the girths on this page are exact and the ages are not: the registry has no age field at all, and nobody has cored these trees. Where a year appears it comes from a settlement date or a plaque rather than from the wood. The registry publishes in inches and feet, and the figures here are converted. It also marks which of its trees stand on public land and which do not, and withholds the positions of the private ones, so several large Houston trees are deliberately absent from this page. The two downtown oaks are not registry trees: their ages and pins come from the Heritage Society and the press, and both pins are approximate. The one thing the registry is good at, and most registers are not, is telling you a tree was alive recently: three of these trees were measured in the last twelve months.
One of Houston's trees also appears in The Autumn Harvest.