The Guadalupe Island Cypress by the Horseshoe Club

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.