Ancient trees in the United States
American cities record their trees the way they record everything else, in public registers with dates attached, which makes the United States unusually good ground for this site's kind of verification. This page maps 23 remarkable trees across 3 cities in the United States, each one researched and verified. The oldest of them is The Queens Giant in New York, at 350-450 years.
New York designates Great Trees, the National Park Service keeps witness trees with named histories, and Boston's Arnold Arboretum holds accession cards going back to the 1870s. The three cities mapped so far run up the east coast, from the two original 1912 cherry trees of Washington's Tidal Basin to an elm on a Manhattan corner that survived everything the twentieth century threw at it. The oldest trees here are not Europe's yews, but the documentation is often better: core samples, planting ledgers, and champions measured to the centimetre.
Every mapped city in the United States
New York13 trees · oldest 350-450 years2Washington DC6 trees · oldest over 165 years, likely pre-dating the Civil War3Boston4 trees · oldest planted between 1772 and 1812, so roughly 214 to 254 years oldThe oldest tree mapped in the United States
The Queens Giant 350-450 years
Douglaston, Queens, New York. This tree was already centuries old when New Amsterdam was still a Dutch trading post, and unlike almost everything else on this list, nobody planted it.
Trees from the United States also appear in The Oldest Tree in Every Country We Map · Trees With a Known Planting Date · Wisteria and Blossom Worth a Spring Trip. See every city on the map, or open the map to find what is near you.