Ancient Trees in Dominion Arboretum

The National Capital Commission's own register carries a bitternut hickory here planted between 1886 and 1890, close enough to that founding date that nobody can say whether it went in with the Arboretum's first plantings or a season or two before them. At roughly 136 to 140 years old, it is the oldest documented tree on these grounds. A jack pine planted in 1921 is the one with the most famous portrait: this is the species Tom Thomson made recognisable, the leaning Algonquin Park silhouette that became one of the best known images in Canadian art, and the Friends of the Central Experimental Farm stop at this specimen on their CelebriTrees walk. Its cones stay sealed with resin until a fire's heat opens them, a trait built for ground this one has never had to survive. Three more widen the range. A dawn redwood, a species known from fossils before living ones turned up in China in the 1940s, grows in the Arboretum's northern section and drops its needles every autumn like a conifer pretending to be deciduous; the register gives no age and the Friends' own tour lists three dawn redwoods nearby, so treat the pin as approximate rather than a match to one exact trunk. A swamp white oak stands where botanists once doubted the species grew this far north at all, tagged by the register for rarity. And a rock elm, a nursery-raised specimen of one of only three elms native to Canada, is young by this map's standards at 45 to 60 years, but its wild population was hit by the same Dutch elm disease that stripped the arching elms off North American streets, and Quebec listed the species as threatened in 2005. All five stand inside the Central Experimental Farm, a National Historic Site open dawn to dusk year-round, free to enter, with free parking on site.