What is the oldest tree in New Orleans?
The oldest tree in New Orleans is the McDonogh Oak, a southern live oak in the Old Grove of City Park, between City Park Avenue and Bayou Metairie. City Park puts it at 700 to 800 years and other accounts stretch to 900, which would make it older than the city by five centuries. The trunk is over eight metres round and the crown reaches about forty six metres across, wide enough that the longest branches now rest on wooden crutches. The Anseman Oak, a few hundred metres west in the same grove, is given the same range and by some accounts is the older of the two. Nobody has cored either, so the honest answer is that they are the two oldest and the order between them is not settled.
Ages here are estimates from City Park and from the Old-Growth Forest Network, which added this grove in 2018 as the first site in Louisiana. None comes from a core sample. Live oak is difficult to date because it grows fast when young, slows unpredictably and often hollows, so a range of two centuries is the honest width. Girths are firmer: the trunk figures come from measured surveys and from the Live Oak Society, which has registered live oaks since 1934 and now lists over ten thousand across fourteen states. Two hundred and forty nine of them stand in City Park, more registered live oaks than anywhere else on earth. That society is a garden club rather than a government body, so it is used here to find and cross-check trees rather than as a register in its own right. Where a pin is marked approximate it means the street or the grove is known and the trunk is not, which in a grove of hundreds of old oaks is worth saying plainly.
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