The Comfort Maple

Ontario built a conservation area around one tree, and this is the tree. The Comfort Maple is widely reckoned the oldest sugar maple in Canada and possibly the oldest tree of any species in the province. The Ontario Forestry Association put it at 400 to 500 years old in 1975 and has separately floated a figure as high as 541, but nobody has counted the rings: coring a living tree of this age damages it, so the number stays an estimate and a deliberately wide one. What has actually been measured is the size. Roughly 24 metres tall, six metres around at the base, a crown spreading close to 38 metres. The Comfort family held the land around it from 1816, and for 145 years the tree survived mainly because they left it standing. Edna Eleanor Comfort signed it over to the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority on 30 April 1961. Ontario listed it as a heritage tree in June 2000. Do not expect it to look pristine. Lightning has struck it at least once, old wounds carry brick and concrete fill, and guy wires take the weight of the heavier limbs. A certified arborist's assessment commissioned by the conservation authority calls it fair in structure and health, in slow decline consistent with its age, and manageable for continued retention. That is a tree under professional watch rather than one being written off.