Los Angeles kept its old trees in odd places: a hotel built its driveway around one, a church was built around another, and the city's oldest palm has been dug up and moved three times. Five of the seven here are Moreton Bay figs, which is genuinely what the city's documented tree history is made of rather than a shortage of ideas. They are spread across sixty kilometres, so treat this as three trips: downtown, Santa Monica, and the arboretum out in Arcadia.
0 of 7 visited in Los Angeles
1
The Miramar Moreton Bay Fig
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · roughly 135 years, planted around 1889-1890 · Santa Monica
The hotel arrived second. This fig was planted around 1889 in the rose garden of the Jones mansion by Georgina Jones, whose husband, Senator John Percival Jones, had founded Santa Monica a decade and a half earlier. The mansion is long gone. The tree went on growing and the Fairmont Miramar was built around it, which is why a five star hotel now has a Moreton Bay fig standing in its front courtyard like a doorman.
It is over 80 feet tall with a canopy about 120 feet across, one of the largest of its kind in California. Moreton Bay figs come from the Australian east coast and were planted all over southern California in the 1880s by people who wanted shade quickly and got rather more than they bargained for; this is the specimen that shows why. Santa Monica made it a city landmark on 17 August 1976, among its first, citing both the tree and its link to the family that started the town.
Nobody has published a girth for it, so if you get a tape around the trunk we would like the number.
You can walk straight up to it from Ocean Avenue, free and at any hour, but this is a working hotel entrance rather than a park, so read the room.
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Photo: Jengod (CC BY-SA 4.0)
2
The Moreton Bay Fig at St. Johns Presbyterian Church
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · roughly 150 years, planted in 1875 · Palms
Los Angeles has protected this fig as Historic-Cultural Monument No. 19 since 1963, which makes it older on the city's list than most of the buildings on it. The tree is older still. It was planted in 1875 by the Smith family to shade their cottage on the La Ballona ranch, by one account in honour of their first son, and it stood alone in farmland for close to ninety years before the Presbyterian church complex went up around it in 1962.
That makes it one of the two oldest documented tree plantings in the city, level with the figs at the old Plaza downtown and older than every other Moreton Bay fig on this list.
Its modern history is a slow argument with the power company, which has cut into the crown repeatedly over the years to keep the overhead lines clear. The tree has absorbed it and kept spreading over the corner of National Boulevard and Military Avenue.
You can see it from the public sidewalk at any time. For a closer look the church grounds are open on weekday mornings and Sunday. No girth or height figure has been published for it, which for a tree this size is a gap worth closing: if you measure it, tell us. The pin marks the church corner rather than the trunk.
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3
The Plaza Fig Trees
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · roughly 150 years, planted in 1875 · Downtown Los Angeles / El Pueblo
On 2 March 2019 one of these figs came down during a Chinese lantern festival in the plaza. It was 144 years old. Nobody was hurt, which given the crowd and the size of the tree was a considerable piece of luck. Three of the original four are still standing.
All of them were planted in 1875 by the horticulturist Elijah Hook Workman around the old Plaza, the square the pueblo of Los Angeles was laid out from and the closest thing the city has to a founding address. That makes them among the oldest documented plantings in Los Angeles, level with the fig at St John's church in Palms and older than the figs of Beverly Hills and Figueroa Street by a generation.
This is one entry for the group rather than three. The gazebo at the centre of the plaza is the place to stand, with the survivors around it and Olvera Street a few steps north.
After the collapse the city inspected the remaining trees and found no risk to the public, and El Pueblo began a process to decide what should be planted in the gap. That is the last dated word we have on their condition, from 2019. If you have walked through the plaza lately, tell us how the three of them look.
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Photo: Clyde Charles Brown (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4
The Oldest Palm Tree in Los Angeles
California Fan Palm (Washingtonia filifera) · documented in Los Angeles since the 1850s, at least 170 years, likely older since it was already a mature palm when first transplanted · Exposition Park
The oldest palm in Los Angeles has been dug up and moved three times, and it is still going. It was taken out of a desert oasis and planted on San Pedro Street in the 1850s. In 1889 it was hauled across town to shade the entrance of the Southern Pacific Railroad's Arcade Depot on Alameda Street. On 5 September 1914, when the depot closed, someone decided it was worth saving again and moved it to Exposition Park, where it stands beside the drive at the Figueroa Street entrance. A plaque at its base records that last journey.
It is around 100 feet tall now. Its documented life in the city runs to at least 170 years, and the real figure is higher, because it was already a mature palm when it was first dug up and nobody wrote down how long it had been standing in the desert before that.
Washingtonia filifera is the only palm native to California, which is the quiet joke of the Los Angeles skyline: almost every palm you can see was shipped in, and the oldest one was already here. A dent partway up the trunk is old damage of some kind. Crews now use cherry pickers rather than climbing spikes to take the dead fronds down, so it collects no new scars.
The Expo Line stops two minutes away.
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5
The Arboretum Coast Live Oak
Coast Live Oak (Quercus agrifolia) · over 200 years · Arcadia
This oak was already a big tree when the Tongva village of Aleupkigna, the place of many waters, still stood on this ground and before the people who lived there were pushed off it. The Arboretum puts it at over 200 years, which means it also predates by a century the Baldwin ranch era of the 1880s that the gardens around it were built from.
Coast live oaks are the tree southern California had before anyone planted anything: evergreen, wide rather than tall, holding their leaves through the dry season on a root system that goes looking for water. This one is stop 2 on the Arboretum's own walking tour, uphill and north of the entrance rotunda, near the Celebration Garden.
Two things to know before you go. The age comes from the Arboretum's own signage and tour notes rather than from an independent measurement, so read it as a careful institutional estimate. And the tree has been under treatment for a fungal disease, with visitors asked to keep out from under the branches while it is being worked on. Look from the edge of the canopy rather than standing beneath it, and check at the gate for the current advice.
The Arboretum charges admission and is open daily, with parking on site.
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6
The Beverly Hills Moreton Bay Fig
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · over 100 years · Beverly Hills
Everyone in Beverly Hills tells the same story about this fig and nobody has produced the paperwork. The story is that Burton Green planted it: the oil man who founded the city in 1906, laid out Beverly Gardens Park and hired Wilbur D. Cook to design it. The park's history is documented and the tree's is not, so treat the planting as local tradition rather than record.
The tree itself needs no defending. It is over a century old, it gets described as one of the largest Moreton Bay figs in the country, and it stands beside the Electric Fountain at Santa Monica and Wilshire, the 1931 fountain given to the city by the family of the silent film comedian Harold Lloyd. The fountain gets the photographs. The fig is the older object and by some distance the stranger one, a low wide dome of a tree with limbs that run out almost horizontally before they think about going up.
Beverly Gardens Park is a long thin public park running for blocks along Santa Monica Boulevard, open at all hours and free. The pin marks the fountain rather than the trunk, and the tree stands beside it.
No girth and no planting year have been published. If you know either, we would like to hear it.
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7
The Auto Club Moreton Bay Fig
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · over 130 years, planted in 1894 · University Park / Downtown-adjacent
Charles C. Chapman planted this fig outside his own house on Figueroa Street in 1894. The house is gone. The tree is not, and when the Automobile Club of Southern California came to build its headquarters on the site it built around the fig instead of felling it, opening the Spanish Colonial Revival building by Sumner Hunt and Silas Burns on 27 January 1923.
A century of undisturbed growth shows. The branches spread over 100 feet, and the aerial roots that Moreton Bay figs drop from their limbs have reached the ground and hardened into buttresses, so that the tree now appears to be standing on several trunks at once.
The Auto Club has treated it as a member of staff ever since. It threw the fig a hundredth birthday party in 1994, and every December it decorates the tree and holds a public lighting event under it, which is a fine time to come and about the only occasion in Los Angeles when people gather to look at a fig.
You can see it from the Figueroa Street sidewalk at any hour; the building is a working AAA branch and open to the public during business hours if you want to stand under the canopy. The pin comes from the street address, so aim for the corner of Figueroa and Adams.
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