The Moreton Bay Fig of Valencia Street

San Francisco's largest Moreton Bay fig grows in a side yard on Valencia Street, beside St. Luke's Hospital. The local tree guide sftrees.com calls it by far the biggest of its kind in the city, where the species is rare; it is far more common in southern California. The city's street tree records put its trunk at about 183 centimetres across at chest height, roughly 5.7 metres round. That is a register estimate on a buttressed trunk, and nobody has published a second measurement. Mayor Gavin Newsom added it to the Landmark Tree list on 24 March 2008. Its age is looser. A 2010 history of the block put it at well over a century and wondered whether Hubert Howe Bancroft planted it himself. The historian kept his library at Valencia and Army Street, now Cesar Chavez, from 1881 to 1906, and a bronze marker about that library stands beside the tree. But Bancroft's own photographs from the 1880s show no fig, so the link stays a guess. If you know when it went in, tell us. Age has cost it. Two big limbs came down within about a year around 2010, one of them onto a car. sftrees.com still calls it a mammoth tree, and a naturalist recorded it alive in February 2025. The yard is private ground, so this is a tree to take in from the Valencia Street sidewalk, not to walk up to.