Oldest trees in Maryland

Maryland once had the most famous oak in America and lost it in an afternoon. The Wye Oak, over four centuries old, came down in a thunderstorm in 2002; the state had built a park around it, and a genetic clone now stands in the same ground. In Baltimore County the Ruxton Liberty Tree is a white oak of roughly three and a half centuries, kept alive on 5,000 gallons of water a week. In the city, tradition holds that Frederick Douglass planted an elm as a boy while he was still enslaved there, and the city's own forestry programme lists the tree. Cylburn Arboretum adds trees that are old in a different sense: a paperbark maple shedding cinnamon curls, and a hawthorn with thorns like nails.