What is the oldest tree in Manchester?
Nobody has dated Manchester's remarkable trees, and the only one here with even a planting period is the Variegated Green Ash in Alexandra Park, which the council's tree survey places at the turn of the 20th century, so roughly 110 to 135 years old. The black poplar in Gorton is very likely older and nobody knows by how much: both sources that describe it say outright that its age is unknown, one calling it a complete enigma, and that is where this page leaves it. Industrial Manchester is the reason there is so little to date. Soot and acid rain killed most of the trees near the centre through the 1800s, so the city's old wood largely did not survive to be measured. If you know of a ring count, a girth or an estate record for any of these five, tell us.
Manchester's list comes from one unusual document: a survey of the city's trees commissioned by the council with Royal Horticultural Society funding and carried out by Owen Johnson, who wrote the Collins Tree Guide. It reads like a specialist's notebook rather than a heritage register. It names a graft chimaera, a group of Crimean limes of national importance, aspens said to be among the tallest in England and a potential champion ash, and it dates almost none of them. Three of the five trees here are described by that survey and by nothing else we could find, which is worth knowing before walking out to one. The single figure on this page comes from the survey's own words about the Alexandra Park ash, planted at the turn of the 20th century, kept here as the wide band it actually is. The black poplar in Gorton is the exception in every direction: two sources, a measured girth of 4.07 metres, and both of them saying plainly that nobody knows its age.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.