What is the oldest tree in Pittsburgh?
Pittsburgh's own Remarkable Trees program has not published an age for any of the twelve trees on this page. It names trees by size and character instead: five here are Pittsburgh Champions, the commission's category for the largest tree of a species on public land, among them a bald cypress in Mellon Park and a ginkgo in Highland Park. No height or girth was published with any of those titles.
The city's Shade Tree Commission, working with Tree Pittsburgh, opened an official call for Remarkable Trees in 2023 and took 44 nominations from residents; 15 met the criteria and became the program's first list, recorded in the commission's March 2023 meeting minutes, and a second round followed in March 2024. Three trees from the first list stand together in Mellon Park, the city's first public arboretum: a champion bald cypress, a katsura with caramel-smelling autumn leaves, and a lacebark pine named for its peeling bark. Arsenal Park in Lawrenceville holds a champion hornbeam and a specimen bald cypress about twenty metres apart, and Highland Park a champion ginkgo and a champion black locust about a hundred metres apart, with a third bald cypress on Stanton Avenue nearby. A copper beech in Frick Park and a sawtooth oak in Westinghouse Park, named a Witness Tree, are about 700 metres from each other. A white oak in Phillips Park carries the Giving Tree title, and the champion American elm stands in Allegheny Commons on the North Side. None of the twelve has a published age, height or girth; the program judges trees by kind of remarkableness rather than by number.
One of Pittsburgh's trees also appears in Autumn Worth the Trip.