Longwood's tree is Lady Liberty, a bald cypress in Big Tree Park that Seminole County puts at about 2,000 years old. For most of that time she grew forty feet from The Senator, an older and larger cypress that was one of Florida's oldest tourist attractions until a fire burned it down in 2012. She is the one that is left: about ten metres round, between 82 and 89 feet tall depending on who measured, fenced beside a boardwalk in a free county park.
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Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) · 2,000 years · Big Tree Park
For about two thousand years, Lady Liberty grew forty feet from an older neighbour. Since 2012 she has been the oldest tree in her park.
The neighbour was The Senator, a bald cypress usually put at 3,500 years old and 47 feet round, one of Florida's oldest tourist attractions. In 2012 a fire lit inside its hollow base burned it down. Lady Liberty, also a bald cypress, is the one that is left, and the county's historic marker calls her the Companion tree or the Sister tree.
Her age is an estimate, about 2,000 years, from that Seminole County marker; nobody has published a ring count. Her size is measured, twice and slightly differently: 389 inches round and 89 feet tall on the marker, 394 inches and 82 feet in the Florida Forest Service's champion tree register. Either way the trunk is about ten metres round.
Her name came much later. Students from Geneva Elementary School gave it to her in 2005. She now carries a lightning rod, because, as a biologist told Spectrum News in 2026, Florida is "a lightning capital of the world".
She stands beside the boardwalk in Big Tree Park in Longwood, a free Seminole County park, open daily from 8 a.m.
Photo: Ebyabe (CC BY-SA 3.0)