What is the oldest tree in Los Angeles?
The oldest tree in Los Angeles is the palm in Exposition Park, a California fan palm documented in the city since the 1850s and already mature when it was first transplanted, which makes it at least 170 years old and probably more. It has been moved three times since, which is why a tree that old stands in a park laid out in 1913.
Age is hard to pin down in Los Angeles because almost nothing here grew where it stands by accident. The figs came in as ornamental plantings in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, and several of them can be dated from the buildings that went up beside them: 1875 for the figs on the old plaza at El Pueblo, planted by the horticulturist Elijah Workman, 1875 for the fig at St John's, 1889 or 1890 at the Miramar, 1894 by the Automobile Club. That is unusually good documentation for a city with no register of individual trees, and it exists because someone wrote down what they planted. What Los Angeles does not have is a protected list: the municipal code protects certain SPECIES rather than certain trees, which is why the city could lose the Encino Oak, a valley oak of a thousand years or more, when it fell in 1998, and why a heritage sycamore in Griffith Park needed a lawsuit and a 2016 settlement to stay standing.
One of Los Angeles's trees also appears in The Tallest Trees We Have Measured.