Ottawaで最も古い樹木はどれですか。
Nobody can name a single oldest tree in this collection with full confidence, though one now has the best claim. Six trees, both Vitifolia lindens in Major's Hill Park, the horse chestnut nearby, the sycamore and coffeetree on Queen Elizabeth Driveway and the linden at Dow's Lake, share the same roughly 125-year estimate, all tied to the same 1900-era planting programme run out of the Central Experimental Farm under William Saunders. A seventh, the willow at Dow's Lake, is dated to the same era in looser terms, around a century old. The Founding-Era Bitternut Hickory in the Dominion Arboretum carries the tightest documented window of any tree here, a planting between 1886 and 1890 recorded by the National Capital Commission's own register, which would put it a decade or so ahead of the 1900 group if the dates hold exactly. The register hedges most of the rest with likely and circa, and no second document dates any of them more precisely, so this page will not force a ranking where the sources themselves overlap. A newer addition, the Mound Elm on Queen Elizabeth Driveway, comes close to the 1900-era group at a register-derived estimate of roughly 120 years, though its planting is not tied to the same documented programme so it is kept as its own estimate rather than folded into the group of six. Ten trees, including the linden beside the National War Memorial, two of the Arboretum's newest additions and the driveway's Red Oak, have no documented age at all. If you can date any of these from a photograph, a planting record or a park document, tell us and the answer here will change.
Ottawa protects trees through the National Capital Commission's own register, A Living Legacy: Remarkable Trees of Canada's Capital, compiled in 2020 as a curated survey rather than a routine inventory. It covers federal land across Ottawa and Gatineau, and for each tree it gives a genuine descriptive paragraph rather than a bare data table, which is unusually rich as sources go. What it does not give is numbers: no age field, no girth, no height, no vitality rating, so most measurement questions here come back as an honest gap rather than a figure. That shapes what this page can say about age. Where the register's own prose ties a tree to a documented event, the planting programme William Saunders ran through the Central Experimental Farm around 1900, or the Dominion Arboretum's own founding years in the 1880s, this page repeats that estimate with the register's own hedges intact. Where a nearby monument's date could be mistaken for the tree's own, as with the National War Memorial's 1939 unveiling beside the Response Linden, this page keeps the two facts separate rather than joining them into a claim the register never makes. All twenty-one sit on federal parkland with no entry barrier.