San Diego's trees were planted, not inherited. In 1892 the city leased Kate Sessions park land on the condition that she plant a hundred trees a year in Balboa Park, and the 1915 exposition brought in much of the rest. So the oldest tree anyone can date here is around 130 years old, which is genuinely old for this city. All four are free: a fig 12 metres round, a cypress from an island off Baja, a kauri from New Zealand, and a tipu that outlived the nursery around it.
0 of 4 visited in San Diego
1
The Moreton Bay Fig of Balboa Park
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · about 112 years · Balboa Park
This fig went into the ground as a five-gallon sapling. That was 1914, planted for the San Diego County garden exhibit at the Panama-California Exposition the year after, and it is the last plant from that exhibit still alive. A survey for the California Registry of Big Trees in 1996 put it at 24 metres tall with a crown 37 metres across and a trunk 12.3 metres round, though that last figure is a buttressed fig mass rather than one clean stem. Moreton Bay figs do not so much grow a trunk as accumulate one.
Its worst years came from being admired. Decades of visitors walking the ground under the crown compacted the soil and damaged the surface roots, and by the 1980s the tree was going backwards. In 1989 it was trimmed and the ground beneath it fenced off. It recovered. The aerial roots now hanging from the limbs are the sign of a fig doing well rather than merely holding on.
Some accounts credit the planting to Kate Sessions, who supplied a great deal of what grows in this park. The Natural History Museum, whose north entrance the tree stands outside, says flatly that there is no documentation for that. A hundred and twelve years on, nobody knows whose hands put it in.
The measurements above are thirty years old. The tree has not stopped growing since.
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2
The Kate Sessions Tipu Tree
Tipu Tree (Tipuana tipu) · about a century old, planted in the 1920s · Pacific Beach
This tipu is the last living thing from Kate Sessions' final nursery. Sessions, the horticulturist San Diego calls the mother of Balboa Park, bought seven acres at Garnet and Pico in Pacific Beach in the 1920s, one source dating the purchase to 1924, and ran Soledad Terrace on the land. The nursery is gone. The tree is what is left of it.
She planted it in 1928 according to katestrees.org, a site kept by a researcher of her work, which also records it as a protected heritage tree. The California Historical Landmarks record gives the looser 'planted in the 1920s', which agrees. Nobody has published a girth or a height for it, so if you happen to be carrying a tape measure, we would like the number.
The bronze plaque beside it is California Historical Landmark No. 764, dedicated in 1961. Read it carefully, because it commemorates the nursery site and Sessions herself rather than this tree. The distinction matters here: her name gets attached to a great many San Diego trees without any document behind it, and this one is the exception, independently credited to her by several sources.
Tipuana tipu comes from Bolivia and Argentina. In early summer it drops sprays of yellow-orange flowers over whatever is underneath, which here is a street corner.
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3
The Guadalupe Island Cypress by the Horseshoe Club
Guadalupe Island Cypress (Cupressus guadalupensis) · roughly 130 years, planted around 1892 · Balboa Park (Bankers Hill edge)
San Diego Magazine went looking for the oldest tree in the city in 2020 and came back with this cypress, then about 128 years old. It is one of the trees Kate Sessions planted under the deal she struck in 1892: the city leased her park land at Sixth and Upas, and in exchange she put a hundred trees a year into Balboa Park. This is among the oldest of her plantings still standing.
The species makes it stranger than the date does. Cupressus guadalupensis grows wild in exactly one place on earth, Isla Guadalupe off Baja California, where feral goats have long been the main threat to what is left of the groves. A large mainland specimen of a tree that rare, on a public lawn beside a chess club, is an odd survival.
Both the Natural History Museum's own account of Sessions and San Diego Magazine name the species, the tree and the spot, and both describe it as enormously tall. Neither publishes a girth or a height, which is the frustrating part of a tree everyone agrees is remarkable. If you can measure it, we will take the number.
A hundred and thirty years is not old in most of the places this site covers. In a city that had to plant its own shade, it is close to the beginning.
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4
The Kauri by the Mingei Museum
Kauri (Agathis australis) · not documented · Balboa Park
There is a New Zealand kauri on the Plaza de Panama and almost nothing about it is written down. Agathis australis is barely grown anywhere in Southern California, which is what makes a mature one standing beside the House of Charm worth crossing the park for, whatever its size turns out to be. The record that confirms it is a single geotagged, photographed observation made in July 2016, still the only record of the species anywhere near San Diego on that platform.
Local pieces have described what is almost certainly this same tree, one of them calling it possibly the most valuable plant in the park, and quoting a height and a rough planting decade. None of those pages could be read directly, so none of their numbers are repeated here. This entry carries no age and no height rather than a figure nobody has checked.
What is left is the tree itself, and it does not look like its neighbours. Kauri grow a straight grey column of a trunk and hold the crown right at the top of it, which reads oddly on a plaza planted with spreading subtropicals.
If you know when it went in, or how tall it is now, tell us. Somebody in San Diego knows, and it is not written down anywhere we can reach.
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