Key West's two remarkable trees are a champion you can eat and a pair the city has asked to cut down. Florida's largest mammee apple grows in the yard of the Key West Firehouse Museum in Old Town, its fruit goes into the museum's annual mamey ice cream social, and the museum puts it at 100 to 120 years old. In the city cemetery, two strangler figs have grown so far into the graves that the city's own foresters asked to remove them. In February 2026 that decision was postponed indefinitely.
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Mammee Apple (Mammea americana) · 110 years · Old Town
Florida's largest mammee apple tree ends up, every year, as ice cream. The Key West Firehouse Museum holds an annual mamey ice cream social, made with fruit from the tree in its yard, and in June 2024 the tree was still bearing.
It is the state champion of its species on the Florida Forest Service register. In 2018 the county forester measured it at 328 centimetres round at chest height and 14.9 metres tall, with a crown about 17 by 12 metres. He also wrote down its condition: fair, mature and declining. The 2024 fruit is the most recent word on its health.
Nobody recorded when it went in. Firehouse No. 3 was built in 1908, and the museum's account is that the tree followed a few years later. Volunteers threw it a 105th birthday party in 2019, a date worked back from the roughly 21 years a mamey needs before it fruits; a 2024 newspaper caption made it 115. Both are the museum's guess, so call it somewhere between 100 and 120.
One naming trap: "mamey" is also the common name of Pouteria sapota, a different species altogether. The register is specific that this one is Mammea americana.
The tree stands on city land between the museum and the building next door. The museum is free, with a suggested donation, and opens Wednesday to Saturday from 10:00 to 14:00. Whether you can see the crown from the street without going in, we have not been able to confirm.
Fig (Ficus sp.) · 100-180 years · Old Town
Key West's own urban foresters have asked to cut these two trees down. The strangler figs in the city cemetery have grown so deep into the graves that the city's forestry report shows them breaking slabs and engulfing headstones, and in November 2025 removing both went on the Tree Commission's agenda.
The report, by Brett Mayle and Zach Bentley of the city's urban forestry team, measured them at 96 and 53 inches across, about 2.4 and 1.35 metres. Worked out as a circle, which a strangler fig's trunk never quite is, the larger comes to roughly 7.7 metres round. It does not say how high up the trunk the tape went.
The local paper calls them over a century old; there is no planting date. The cemetery was founded in 1847, after the hurricane of 1846, and a resident wrote to the commission that most of the graves beneath the figs date from the 1880s.
Residents wrote in against it.The November meeting was cancelled for lack of a quorum, and by February 2026 city staff had asked for the decision to be postponed indefinitely. That is the last word we have found: no vote, and the figs still standing among the stones.
No source names the species, so we give only the genus, and none says where in the 19-acre cemetery they stand, or how far apart. Our pin is the cemetery's middle, in Old Town. Entry is free. If you find them, tell us where.