Wat is de oudste boom van Kansas City?

Every tree on this page grows within a few hundred feet of each other on the Linda Hall Library's arboretum lawn, and every age here starts from the same kind of record: a planting date kept in the library's own files rather than a growth-ring estimate. The horsechestnut went into the ground in 1956, the purple beech in 1971, the Shumard oak in 1968, and the hardy rubber tree, the youngest of the four, in 1975. All four are registered with the Champion Tree Program of Greater Kansas City, a metro-wide survey that has tracked the largest known tree of each species since 1955, when the J.C. Nichols Company's own landscaping department started the count. All four hold that title for their kind today, from a Chinese species with no close living relatives to a horsechestnut bred never to drop a conker. Nobody outside the library has independently measured any of them since a 2008 survey, so treat the girths and heights on this page as the institution's own record rather than a fresh third-party check, and tell us if you have measured one more recently.