Photo: Tman21901 (CC BY 3.0)
Roughly 350 to 400 years old.
Oldest trees in Massachusetts
The oldest tree we map in Massachusetts is The Sunderland Buttonball Tree in Sunderland, Massachusetts, at well over 350 years, possibly closer to 400. We map 12 trees across 2 places in Massachusetts, each one researched and verified.
Massachusetts has fewer giants than the West and more paperwork, which makes its old trees unusually easy to date. Harvard's Arnold Arboretum has catalogued its collection since 1872, so a paperbark maple can be traced to one wild seedling dug in China in 1907 and a white oak was core-sampled to the early 1800s. The seed that put the dawn redwood back into the ground after millions of years as a fossil arrived in Boston in 1948, and the trees grown from it still stand in the arboretum. In Cambridge, a copper beech became the city's only living Historic Landmark to stop a building going up. Out in the Connecticut River valley, the Sunderland Buttonball, a sycamore, is older than the Constitution its plaque measures it against.
Every place we map in Massachusetts
11 species grow in Massachusetts
Oaks White Oak 1
Beeches Copper Beech 1
Elms and zelkovas English Elm 1
Planes American Sycamore 1
Limes Small-leaved Lime 1
Maples Paperbark Maple 1
Conifers Dawn Redwood 2 · Hinoki Cypress 1
Fruit and blossom Apple 1
More broadleaf trees Franklin Tree 1 · Katsura 1
The 10 oldest trees we map in Massachusetts
Roughly 288 to 290 years old.
Roughly 220 to 250 years old.
Roughly 214 to 254 years old.
Roughly 200 to 230 years old.
Roughly 195 to 220 years old.
Roughly 147 to 149 years old.
Roughly 120 to 122 years old.
Roughly 118 to 120 years old.
Roughly 75 to 78 years old.
Trees from Massachusetts also appear in Autumn Worth the Trip · The Autumn Harvest · The Tallest Trees We Have Measured. See every place we map in the United States, or open the map to find what is near you.