What is the oldest tree in Quebec City?
The oldest tree anyone has put a number on in Quebec City is a northern red oak on Rue De Laune, inside Parc des Champs-de-Bataille, which La Presse described as the park's oldest at more than 250 years. The article named no particular trunk, and five red oaks are registered along that short stretch, so the claim sits here on the largest of them: 132 centimetres of diameter at breast height in the city's inventory against 89 to 110 for the other four. If the 250 years are right, it was already growing when the Battle of the Plains of Abraham was fought across this ground in 1759. No other tree on this page carries a published age at all.
Every tree here comes from the Ville de Quebec's open inventory of potentially remarkable trees, published by the city's environment service, and from the public part of it: most of that register sits on private land. Two things about that source shape this page. It records the diameter of a trunk at breast height rather than the circumference, so every measurement quoted here has been converted, and it carries no age field at all, which is why five of the six trees are described by size and species and not by years. The ages and the history come from elsewhere: La Presse's account of the arboricultural heritage of the battlefield park, which reports its oldest tree as a red oak of more than 250 years on Rue De Laune and describes roughly 750 elms treated tree by tree against Dutch elm disease, and the city's own heritage page for Grande Allee, which dates the avenue's widening and its American elm planting to the end of the 1880s and records a heritage-tree inventory of the axis in 2011. All six stand on free public ground and string together into one walk of about two and a half kilometres.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.