What is the oldest tree in Nice?
Nice's oldest documented trees are the olive trees of the Cimiez monastery garden, some individually estimated at more than 400 years old, growing in a walled garden whose grid layout has not changed since Franciscan monks laid it out after settling on the hill in 1546. No single tree there has an individually measured age; the figure comes from the grove's general estimate rather than one named specimen.
Nice is unusual on this list for how recent most of its remarkable trees actually are: the city as a modern resort dates almost entirely from the mid-19th century onward, when the Promenade des Anglais, the Jardin Albert 1er and the forested hillsides around the bay were all laid out within a few decades of each other. That makes the Cimiez olive grove the clear outlier, a garden whose grid layout has been unchanged since the 1540s, planted with olives whose exact ages were never individually recorded but which local sources place at four centuries and beyond for at least some specimens, decades older than anything the 19th century resort boom produced. The garden is free, faces the Roman arena and the Monastery of Cimiez, and adjoins the cemetery where Matisse is buried under an olive tree of his own. It sits a 20 minute uphill walk, or a short bus ride, from central Nice.
One of Nice's trees also appears in The Autumn Harvest, a themed collection spanning several cities.