What is the oldest tree in San Diego?
The oldest tree in San Diego is a Guadalupe Island cypress on the Sixth Avenue side of Balboa Park, beside the chess and horseshoe club building, at roughly 130 years. San Diego Magazine went looking for the city's oldest tree in 2020 and named this one, putting it at about 128 years then. It is one of the trees Kate Sessions planted under her 1892 lease of park land at Sixth and Upas, which obliged her to plant a hundred trees a year in Balboa Park.
A hundred and thirty years is a young answer by the standards of most cities, and here it is the right one. San Diego's shade is not old growth that a city grew up around; it was planted, mostly between 1892 and the 1915 Panama-California Exposition, and a tree that predates that effort is hard to find on the mesa. So the oldest trees in the city are the earliest plantings rather than the last survivors of anything. The cypress has a second thing going for it. Cupressus guadalupensis grows wild in one place on earth, Isla Guadalupe off Baja California, where feral goats have long been the main threat to it, and a large mainland specimen is unusual for that reason alone. Nobody has published a girth or a height for this one, which is the frustrating part of a tree that two independent sources both call enormously tall. The runner-up is easier to date exactly. The Moreton Bay fig outside the Natural History Museum went in as a five-gallon sapling in 1914 and is the last plant left from the county garden exhibit it was planted for.
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