What is the oldest tree in Portland?
Portland's tallest tree is the Douglas fir above Balch Creek in Macleay Park, part of Forest Park, measured at 243 feet or 74.1 metres, which makes it the tallest tree on this whole site by a wide margin. It is free to visit on Portland Parks land. The city's Heritage Tree ordinance has protected individual trees by council vote since 1993, and this page draws on that register and on the city's own field guide to it, From Stumptown to Treetown.
Portland's Heritage Tree register is unusually good and unusually blunt: it gives girth, height, species and a per-tree coordinate, and it records ownership, which turns out to matter more than anything else here. Roughly two fifths of the trees on it stand in private front, side or rear yards, and a tree in a rear yard cannot be visited or even seen, so none of those can appear on this page whatever their size. Everything here stands on right-of-way, park or public campus ground where a visitor may simply turn up. The register also lags reality: a delisting ordinance in 2026 confirmed trees dead that its own rows still listed, so each entry here was checked separately for whether the tree is standing. Two figures on this page are disputed between sources and both disputes are stated in the tree's own story rather than resolved silently, because a register and a field guide disagreeing is worth knowing about.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.