What is the oldest tree in Melbourne?
The oldest tree in Melbourne that anyone has put a date on is the Osage Orange of Yarra Boulevard, in Yarra Bend Park at Burnley, dated to the 1860s and so around 160 years old. The Victorian Heritage Database's citation for the Boulevard Parklands records an Osage orange north-east of the point where Yarra Boulevard meets Swan Street and puts it in that decade; the City of Yarra's significant tree register lists one at the same spot, 27 metres tall and 169 centimetres of diameter at breast height, roughly 5.31 metres round. That is a claim about the best-dated tree rather than the oldest thing growing in the city: eight of the twelve trees on this page carry only the register's band of over a hundred years, with no year attached at all, and a 2015 account of Burnley Gardens describes a river red gum there believed to exceed 400 years without tying the claim to a particular trunk.
This page is built on the City of Yarra's significant tree register, walked in 2012, and two things about that source shape everything here. It publishes the diameter of a trunk at breast height rather than the circumference, so every girth quoted on this page is a conversion. And its age field is a set of bands rather than years: eight of these twelve trees carry nothing more precise than over a hundred years. The dates that do exist come from elsewhere. The National Trust of Australia dated the English elm in Darling Gardens at about 120 years in February 2011, making it roughly 135 now, and the Victorian Heritage Database puts the Osage orange on Yarra Boulevard in the 1860s, which is why that tree carries the answer. One rival claim cannot be checked: a 2015 account of Burnley Gardens describes a river red gum believed to exceed 400 years, but nobody has matched it to a trunk. The Osage orange sits on the second of two walks here, six trees running from Burnley Gardens out along Yarra Boulevard, while the other six are three kilometres north of the CBD. See the full list on the Melbourne page.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.