What is the oldest tree in San Francisco?
Nobody has dated most of San Francisco's remarkable trees, so the honest answer is a planting era rather than an age. The oldest here is Uncle John's Tree, the Monterey cypress on the lawn outside McLaren Lodge at the eastern end of Golden Gate Park, which the park's historians put at planted around 1880, so roughly 135 to 155 years old. It is named for John McLaren, the park's long-serving superintendent, who died in 1943, and it has been lit as the city's Christmas tree since 1929. None of the other five trees on this page carries a documented planting date at all, and the city's Landmark Tree register does not record one. If you know a date, or have a photograph old enough to help, tell us.
San Francisco keeps a Landmark Tree register rather than an ancient-tree register, and the difference explains this page. Trees are designated one at a time under Article 16 of the Public Works Code, on grounds of size, rarity or the part they play in a street, and the list runs to roughly twenty-five trees citywide. Five of the six here come off it. What that register does not record is age, and neither does anything else within reach: not the 2005 Board of Supervisors resolution that landmarked the bay laurel outside the Customs House, not the city's own entry for the Dolores Street palms, not Mike Sullivan's Trees of San Francisco, which is the standard reference for this city. That leaves the dating to circumstance. The gold rush arrived in 1849, Golden Gate Park was sand dunes until the 1870s, and the Mission and Bernal Heights streets these trees stand on were laid out later still, so a tree of 150 years is an early one by local reckoning. If you can date any of the six, that is the gap this page would most like closed.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.