The Black Tupelo of the Ramble

Central Park has two competing claimants for its oldest tree, and this one has the better paperwork. A London plane near the Reservoir might date to 1862, when the Reservoir itself was excavated, but this black tupelo in the Ramble, the deliberately wild, maze-like woodland Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed into the park's plan, has documentation placing its planting at 1858, four years earlier, during the park's original construction. Black tupelos are native to eastern North American wetlands and swamps, not the schist bedrock Central Park sits on, which makes this a planted specimen rather than a survivor of the farmland and settlements the park displaced. The species is prized by ecologists for its brilliant, early scarlet fall color and by foresters for its resistance to rot, qualities that have let this tree outlast most of the park's original 1850s plantings. It stands in one of the Ramble's quieter, less trafficked paths, a 19th century engineering project that has spent a century and a half looking convincingly unplanned.