What is the oldest tree in Montreal?
The oldest tree on this page is a northern red oak in Parc du Mont-Royal, standing off a secondary trail leading from the Olmsted Trail. The city's own dendrological survey measured it at 118 centimetres across the trunk at chest height and 200 centimetres at the base, and reads that as roughly two hundred years, which makes it one of the ten largest oaks on the mountain. It seeded itself rather than being planted, and it was already mature when the park was laid out around it in 1876. In 1954 Mayor Jean Drapeau had much of the mountain's undergrowth cleared in a campaign remembered afterwards as the morality cuts, and this oak came through that too. Two things are worth knowing before you go. It stands in a stand of white spruce about fifty years old, which makes the age difference obvious the moment you are standing there. And it is not in good health: a primary branch tore out and left a major cavity in the trunk, and the city's survey describes it as being in the twilight of its life, which is a formal way of saying go sooner rather than later.
There is no national or provincial register of remarkable trees behind this page. What Montreal has instead is unusual and better: the Ville de Montreal publishes a dendrological page for individual designated trees on Mont-Royal and in the two cemeteries on its flank, carrying species, trunk diameter at chest height and at the base, an age reading and a paragraph of history. Six of the seven trees here rest on that source alone, which is why each of those pages says so in plain words and carries a flag; only the McGill ginkgo has two independent accounts. Every pin on this city is marked approximate, and that is not modesty: the source places a tree in a cemetery section or along a trail rather than on a spot, so the prose carries the findable detail instead, a plot number, a gate, a parking area. One tree that was on the original list is not here. The cemetery's designated red ash was felled in 2025 to the emerald ash borer, which we learned because its own page now redirects to an address ending in disparu. See the full list of seven on the Montreal page.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.