What is the oldest tree in Perth?
The oldest tree in Perth is Gija Jumulu in Kings Park, a boab reckoned to be over 750 years old, but it has only stood there since July 2008, when it was lifted from beside Telegraph Creek near Warmun and driven 3200 kilometres south. The oldest tree that actually grew where you find it is the Old Jarrah in Armadale, estimated at 400 to 800 years.
Both answers to this question come with an asterisk, and the asterisks are the interesting part. Gija Jumulu was removed to make way for a road bridge rather than for display, and the Gija people of the East Kimberley held a farewell ceremony before the 37 tonne tree began its journey. It was replanted in Kings Park on 20 July 2008 and it lived, which is not a given for a tree of that size and age. The Old Jarrah in Armadale is dated by the state heritage register at 400 to 800 years, a band wide enough to be honest about how little anyone knows: nobody has cored it, and its trunk has never been measured in any source we found. It is also the tree with the harder story. Vandals ringbarked it in 1997, three quarters of its canopy is gone, and 1147 people wrote to the government asking for it to be protected. Everything else on this page is a colonial planting from the 1880s or later, dated from photographs and records rather than from the wood.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.