Washington is a planned city, and its remarkable trees were planned with it, which means they come with paperwork most cities can only envy. The National Park Service keeps a register of witness trees, individuals that stood through history, and the Architect of the Capitol records plantings to the year. The fourteen below run from the two original 1912 cherry trees that started the Tidal Basin tradition to a bur oak older than the memorial it shades. Nine sit on or near the Mall and Capitol grounds, one walk apart; all fourteen are free.
0 / 14 bezocht in Washington DC
1
The Grant Memorial Bur Oak
Bur Oak (Quercus macrocarpa) · roughly 175 years, possibly older · Capitol Hill / National Mall (Union Square)
In the 1930s Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. cleared about 250 trees out of Union Square and transplanted 41 more. This bur oak he left exactly where it was. It has grown on this spot since at least 1850, when the United States Botanic Garden moved its greenhouse collections onto this ground, which makes it one of the very few trees on the Capitol campus that predates the twentieth century redesign of everything around it. The Architect of the Capitol puts it at 150 to 175 years. The National Park Service witness tree survey is more careful and says the true age is simply unknown, noting only that aerial photographs taken at the Grant Memorial's dedication in April 1922 already show a large, well developed tree. Read 175 years as a floor rather than a figure. What it has outlived: the demolition of the old Botanic Garden buildings in 1930, Olmsted's redesign of the square, and the 1971 installation of the Capitol Reflecting Pool, which took out most of the trees that were still standing. When surveyed in November 2006 it measured 125 feet tall, with an 85 foot crown and a trunk 165 inches around, the largest bur oak recorded in Washington. Bur oaks can approach a thousand years and are not considered mature until 200 or 300. By the standards of its own species, this giant is still young.
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2
The First Cherry Trees of the Tidal Basin
Yoshino Cherry (Prunus x yedoensis) · roughly 114 years · Tidal Basin / West Potomac Park
Two trees started everything the Tidal Basin is now known for. On 27 March 1912 First Lady Helen Herron Taft and Viscountess Chinda, wife of the Japanese ambassador, each planted a Yoshino cherry on the north bank, the first two of a gift of more than 3,000 from Tokyo. Around a hundred of that original planting are thought to survive. These two are the ones you can actually pick out, marked by a bronze plaque at their base. They are old for what they are. Yoshino cherries in cultivation usually manage 50 to 100 years, and these are past 114, which is why the Park Service treats their survival as a story rather than a footnote. They were rooted here before the Lincoln Memorial was finished, before the Jefferson Memorial went up across the water, and before the festival that now walks well over a million people past them every spring. One honest note on the pin. The coordinates come from the surveyed position of the commemorative marker rather than from the trunks, and the marker itself has since been replaced by another one nearby, so expect to hunt for the plaque along a short stretch of path roughly 125 feet south of Independence Avenue. The trees are within a stone's throw of it.
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3
The Battery Kemble Chestnut Oak
Chestnut Oak (Quercus montana) · over 165 years, likely pre-dating the Civil War · Palisades
The largest tree in Washington may owe its size to having been cut down. In 1861 the Union Army built Battery Kemble on this hill to defend the capital from the west, and the standard practice at the city's earthworks was to clear the ground for a field of fire, felling trees about five feet above the soil. Chestnut oak, unusually among oaks, resprouts readily from a cut stump. This tree's low, wide, multi stemmed form is exactly what that produces, which is why every account says it was around before the Civil War instead of giving it a planting date. The measurements do the rest of the talking. Casey Trees' volunteer big tree survey crowned it the city's largest known tree in 2023, at 24 feet 3 inches around, and American Forests lists it as a national co-champion, meaning no bigger chestnut oak has been recorded anywhere in the United States. Take the 165 years as a floor: the root system under those stems could be considerably older than the trunks standing on it. It grows in a quiet neighbourhood park in the Palisades rather than downtown, and no source publishes coordinates for the tree itself. The pin is the park, so the last stretch is done on foot and by eye. At that circumference, you will know it when you reach it.
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Foto: Katy Swiere (CC BY 4.0)
4
The National Mall Jefferson Elm
American Elm (Ulmus americana 'Jefferson') · roughly 91 years · National Mall
Every 'Jefferson' elm planted in the United States is a cutting taken from this tree. It went into the ground around 1935, one of roughly 600 American elms set in four rows to frame the Mall's central green, and by rights it should have died with the rest. Dutch elm disease reached the Mall in 1950 and had killed more than 200 of that planting by 1994. In the early 1990s the Park Service pathologist Horace Wester noticed that tree number 3-487 leafed out earlier than its neighbours and held its leaves longer. A decade of testing by the Park Service, the National Arboretum and Michigan State confirmed genuine resistance to the disease. DNA work then found something stranger: the tree is triploid, carrying 42 chromosomes where an American elm carries 56, which appears to explain both the resistance and the strong U shaped branch unions that keep it from splitting in storms. In February 2005 cuttings went out to commercial nurseries as the 'Jefferson' cultivar, named for the drive it stands beside. It is neither the oldest nor the biggest tree in this city, and it may be the most consequential, because American elms are going back into streets across the country on the strength of its genetics. The survey that recorded it placed it across Jefferson Drive from the Freer Gallery without giving a coordinate, so this pin is close rather than exact.
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5
The Washington Monument Witness Mulberry
White Mulberry (Morus alba) · roughly 130-140 years · National Mall (Washington Monument grounds)
This tree fell over in May 2019 and the Park Service refused to remove it. Days of rain had saturated the ground on the Washington Monument lawn, the main buttress root snapped, and the larger of two old white mulberries here went down. Instead of cutting it up, arborists raised the trunk back by about ten degrees, enough to encourage new feeder roots without tearing what was left of the root plate, and built it a steel crutch. It has been standing nearly horizontal on that prop ever since, living on roughly 60 percent of its roots. Its neighbour, the shorter of the pair, leans hard and is crutched too, and is in better condition. Both are recorded by the Park Service witness tree programme as part of the landscape planted after the monument was completed in 1885, probably in the 1890s, which puts them somewhere around 130 to 140 years old. Be clear about what this is. It is not a grand tree and it is not a pretty one. It is a public agency visibly refusing to give up on something that history happened around, propped in plain sight at roughly seven o'clock on the circular path. And it is fragile: the most recent confirmation of its condition we have found dates from December 2023, so that is the last time anyone we can cite looked at it.
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6
The Botanic Garden Elm
Caucasian Elm (Zelkova carpinifolia) · roughly 175 years, possibly older · Capitol Hill / National Mall (Union Square)
When Union Square was rebuilt in the 1930s, five Caucasian elms survived the clearance. Four were dug up and transplanted. This one was left exactly where it grew, which is why it matters more than the other four. It has stood on this spot since around 1850, when the United States Botanic Garden moved its greenhouse collections here, some of them gathered on the Wilkes Expedition of 1838 to 1842. Zelkova carpinifolia comes from the mountains of the Caucasus and northern Iran and is still an uncommon tree in American planting. This one is almost certainly among the largest in the country, though it will never appear in the national register of champion trees, which tracks native species only. The Park Service survey calls it the most historically significant tree remaining in Union Square, because it is the one that combines all three things: planted in the Botanic Garden's own period, never moved, and genuinely rare. Its position saved it twice. Sitting at the far southwest edge, well outside the central vista Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. was carving, it escaped the 1930s clearance that took 250 trees, then escaped again in 1971 when the Capitol Reflecting Pool went in and destroyed most of what remained. The Architect of the Capitol puts it at 150 to 175 years. The Grant Memorial bur oak, from the same original planting, stands about 350 metres away across the same square.
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7
The Arboretum Willow Oak
Willow Oak (Quercus phellos) · rumoured to date to the Civil War era, confirmed fully grown by the 1940s · Mahan / National Arboretum, Northeast DC
The second largest tree in Washington is dying, and the people who measured it said so out loud. When Casey Trees brought its 2023 big tree survey to the National Arboretum, this willow oak came in at 287 inches around, beaten by a matter of inches only by the chestnut oak at Battery Kemble. Standing under it, the Arboretum's own arborist put the other half of the story just as plainly: this tree is near the end of its life. The 2012 derecho tore into it, carpenter worms were treated in 2015, and it has been decaying and taking storm damage ever since. Staff are not removing it. They trim the rotting limbs to keep visitors safe and go on buying it time, which is a decision about what an old tree is worth rather than a horticultural one.
Its age is folklore. Casey Trees repeats a local story tracing it to the Civil War, but the earliest hard evidence anyone cites is a 1940s photograph showing it already grown and visibly smaller than it is now. Ninety years is the floor, 160 the hopeful ceiling.
Two honest notes before you go. Nobody publishes where inside the grounds it stands, so the pin is the Arboretum and the last stretch is a question for staff. And the most recent confirmation of its condition we can cite is August 2023, before the storms of the summers since. If you find it changed, or gone, tell us.
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8
The Survey Lodge Catalpas
Catalpa (Catalpa sp.) · roughly 124 years · National Mall (Washington Monument grounds)
The small stone building these catalpas flank was made out of the Washington Monument's leftovers. Survey Lodge went up in 1889 from marble and granite spare from the monument itself, and housed the boiler that drove the first elevator to the top. The trees came about thirteen years later, part of an oval carriage road lined with fir, pine, crape myrtle and catalpa that was in place by 1902. They stand where a visitor walks straight into them, between the lodge's front door and the road, which is why the Park Service lists them among the trees on this ground worth protecting rather than treating them as ordinary shade.
The date is not perfectly settled, and the two accounts of it do not pretend otherwise. The National Park Trust says flatly that they were planted in 1902. The Park Service is more careful and says only that they could date from the turn of the century planting. Either reading puts them here through the 1930s, when the monument beside them shut for its first major restoration and the ground was dug over around their roots.
Nobody has settled the species either. Northern and southern catalpa both grow in Washington and neither source says which these are, so you can work on it yourself in June: the northern carries fewer, larger flowers, the southern more of them and smaller. Both hang the same long seed pods afterwards.
The lodge is a ranger office and closed. The trees are not.
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9
The Willow Oak Circle
Willow Oak (Quercus phellos) · at least 45 years, possibly around a century · National Mall / Constitution Gardens
Nobody can say whether these trees are a century old or fifty, and both answers come from the same two sources. Cross the grass south of the Vietnam Women's Memorial to the next path and you end up standing inside a tight ring of willow oaks without having meant to. That is the whole experience of the place, and both the Park Service and the National Park Trust describe visitors arriving in it by accident.
The two theories run like this. One says the circle was planted in the 1920s to ring a picnic clearing, which would make the trees about a hundred. The other says they went in during the 1970s rebuilding of Constitution Gardens, done for the Bicentennial in 1976, which would make them about fifty. Neither source picks a side, and neither will we, so the age here is a range wide enough to hold two entirely different stories.
What the circle has watched is not in doubt. It was already standing when the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated just south of it in 1982, and when the Women's Memorial was added in 1993. Willow oaks are the workhorse of the National Mall, planted here by the thousand along avenues and lawns. These are the ones somebody arranged into a shape on purpose.
Neither source counts them, incidentally. Go and count them.
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10
The Cork Trees of the FDR Memorial
Amur Cork Tree (Phellodendron amurense) · at least 80 years as of the original 2006 HALS survey, so roughly 100 years now · Tidal Basin / West Potomac Park (FDR Memorial)
In 1962 the National Park Service went looking for a record of who planted these trees and found that nobody had written it down. The letter noting the gap survives. Rather than treat an unrecorded planting as an accident to be tidied away, the Service kept them on the grounds that they were, in its own words, very attractive old trees. That is the entire provenance of a small stand of Amur cork trees growing on ground where almost everything else has a paper trail.
They were here long before the memorial they now sit inside. The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial was dedicated in 1997 and its landscape was laid out around plantings left from an older scenic drive along the Tidal Basin. A sign beside the trees calls them eighty years old, which would put the planting somewhere around the 1930s, but the sign's own date is not known, so read eighty as a minimum and roughly a century as the working figure.
You will recognise them by their manners rather than their height. Amur cork trees throw heavy, low, sprawling limbs, and these have let theirs down onto the ground, which is why the Park Service has put up two signs asking people not to climb them. The bark is thick and deeply corky, which is where the species gets its name.
Walk past the visitor centre restrooms and follow the waterfront path between Room Three and the water.
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11
The Montrose Park Tulip Poplar
Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) · not documented; among DC's largest tulip poplars · Georgetown
Two websites call this the second largest tree in Washington. Casey Trees, whose volunteers did the measuring, ranks it fifth. Their survey put it at 235 inches around and roughly 110 feet tall with a crown spreading about a hundred feet, behind two willow oaks and the chestnut oak out at Battery Kemble that holds a national co-championship. What both readings agree on is narrower and still worth the hill: no bigger tulip poplar has turned up in the District's surveys.
Nobody has dated it. The Historic American Landscape Survey recorded it under its witness tree program, which is a heritage listing rather than a birth certificate, and neither that record nor Casey Trees puts a year on the tree. Tulip poplars rarely pass 250 years and a trunk this thick is not the work of a few decades, but any age you see attached to this tree, here or anywhere, is arithmetic from its girth rather than a measurement.
It grows on the slope in the northwest corner of Montrose Park, where Lovers Lane starts dropping toward Dumbarton Oaks Park, so the beech grove walk begins more or less at its feet. No tree level coordinate is published anywhere, so the pin is the corner of the park and the last stretch is done by eye. At 235 inches around, that is not a hard search.
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12
Frederick Douglass's Magnolias at Cedar Hill
Southern Magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) · roughly 145 years · Anacostia
Frederick Douglass planted these two magnolias for his wife, or so his household always said. The window the tradition gives runs from 1877, when he bought Cedar Hill and moved his family up onto the Anacostia ridge, to 1882, when Anna Murray Douglass died. There is no receipt, no diary entry and no nursery record. The story comes down through the family and the site rather than on paper, which is how most of what is known about any house's garden survives. Casey Trees, on the grounds in February 2026, found both trees still standing outside the window of his study.
That study is the reason to come. Douglass worked here for the last eighteen years of his life, through his term as US Marshal for the District and his appointment as minister to Haiti, and the view out of it was these two trees. Southern magnolias hold their leaves all year, so they were green outside that window in every season he wrote at it.
The Cultural Landscape Foundation records two magnolias east of the residence dating to the late nineteenth century, which puts the pair itself beyond dispute even where the planting story rests on memory.
The grounds are free to walk. The house tour that brings you closest runs on timed tickets, booked in advance or picked up at the visitor centre.
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13
The Olmsted Tuliptree, Capitol Grounds
Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) · roughly 135-150 years · Capitol Hill
Frederick Law Olmsted planted more than 1,050 trees on the Capitol grounds and about 45 of them are still alive. This is the largest of the three tulip trees among the survivors. His General Plan for the grounds dates from 1874 and the planting ran on into the 1890s, so the tree is somewhere between about 130 and 150 years old, dated by the works rather than by the wood.
It stands in Capitol Square along Northeast Drive, across from the Russell Senate Office Building, which is worth noticing because the building is the younger of the two. Russell opened in 1909, decades after the tree went into ground Olmsted had already landscaped. He was not decorating: his argument was that the Capitol looked smaller than it deserved on its bare hill, and the terraces and plantings were his answer to that, an architectural case made in trees.
A tuliptree of this age is an unlikely thing to find on ground worked over as often as this. Terraces, a subway, an underground visitor centre, security lines and a century and a half of ceremonies have gone in around it, and it is among the few living things on the 274 acre campus that predate almost all of them.
No tree level coordinate is published. The Architect of the Capitol names the drive and the building it faces, which is enough to find it on foot in a few minutes.
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14
The Dumbarton Oaks Beech Grove
American Beech (Fagus grandifolia) · not documented; predates the park's 1920s-30s design · Georgetown
Beatrix Farrand did not plant these beeches. When she laid out the park below Dumbarton Oaks around 1930, the American beech grove at the Lovers' Lane gate was already standing and already old enough to be worth keeping, so she designed around it and made it the way in. Two acres of smooth grey trunks is what you walk through before the park proper starts.
Nobody has dated them. American beech is slow, and a grove substantial enough for a landscape architect to build an entrance around in 1930 had to have been there well before her, but there is no ring count and no planting record, so anything more precise than that would be invented.
The grove carries a survey number, HALS DC-13, filed at the Library of Congress under the same witness tree program that recorded the tulip poplar up the hill in Montrose Park. It has also had a hard century. When the Dumbarton Oaks Park Conservancy started work in 2012, this grove was the first thing it took on, clearing invasive growth and rebuilding the way water moves down the slope, and that work is still running.
One thing to sort out before you go: this park is free, open and run by the Park Service. The formal gardens next door, on the same estate's old ground, charge admission and are a different visit entirely.
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