Ancient Trees in the Arnold Arboretum

A white oak on Peters Hill was already growing wild when the Arboretum absorbed the land, and it took until 2010 for anyone to accession it into the record and 2018 to core-sample it to a germination date in the early 1800s. Higher up the same hill, a Japanese black pine grown from seed E.H. Wilson bought in Yokohama in 1919 has spent a century twisting into the wind-shaped form Japanese gardeners spend decades training into a tree. A Franklin tree in the Explorers Garden descends from a species that has not grown wild anywhere on earth for roughly two hundred years, ever since John Bartram found it on a few acres of Georgia riverbank in 1765 and the wild population vanished within a generation. A dawn redwood by the Hunnewell Visitor Center grew from a 1948 seed shipment out of Hubei, China, sent after the species turned up alive in the Chinese interior having previously been known only from fossils. A paperbark maple in the Maple Collection is one of two seedlings a single plant collector dug out of a Chinese wood in 1907, the shared ancestor of nearly every paperbark maple now growing in America. And two katsura trees along Meadow Road began as seed mailed from Sapporo in 1878 by the college president who helped found what is now Hokkaido University. All are open to the public, free, every day of the year.