What is the oldest tree in Key West?
We map two trees in Key West: the Firehouse Museum Mamey, Florida's state champion mammee apple, which the museum puts at somewhere between 100 and 120 years old, and the strangler figs of the Key West Cemetery, which the local paper calls over a century old. Neither has a planting record.
The mamey stands on city land between the Key West Firehouse Museum and the building next door, at the corner of Grinnell and Virginia streets. In 2018 the county forester measured it at 328 centimetres round and 14.9 metres tall and recorded it as fair, mature and declining; it was still bearing fruit in June 2024. Its age is the museum's estimate, worked back from the roughly 21 years a mamey needs before it fruits. The museum is free, with a suggested donation, and opens Wednesday to Saturday from 10:00 to 14:00. The cemetery figs are over a century old by the local paper's account, though nobody has a planting date. The city measured them at 96 and 53 inches across, and its report shows them breaking and engulfing gravestones, most of them from the 1880s by a resident's account. The urban foresters asked to remove both in November 2025; residents objected, and the decision was postponed. We have not found where in the 19-acre cemetery they stand.
One of Key West's trees also appears in The Oldest Tree in Every City We Map.