Big Red

The Long Branch Hotel burned down in 1958. The oak beside it did not, and it is still on the corner. Big Red is a northern red oak at Long Branch Avenue and Park Boulevard, named by the neighbourhood for what it does in October. Diameter measurements put its start in the late 1810s; Forests Canada rounds that to about 200 years and the early 1800s, which is close enough agreement to work with. Its height is less settled. Forests Canada records 24 metres, a 2024 local report says 33, and neither explains how it was measured, so both figures are on the record and neither has won. In the late 1800s it stood near a fountain in the grounds of the Long Branch Grove and Resort, a lakeside destination Torontonians came out to by train. The resort went. The hotel went. The streets arrived. In 1933 the cenotaph went up beside the oak, and the tree has stood next to the names of three wars ever since, which is the reason to come in November rather than the reason to come in October. Forests Ontario made it Long Branch's first heritage tree in April 2018, listed at 200 years. It is by some distance the oldest thing on that corner.