What is the oldest tree in Vancouver?
Vancouver's most specifically dated remarkable tree is the pair of saucer magnolias at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre in Vanier Park, planted in 1912 and about 114 years old. The Comox Street Caucasian wingnut, the widest of its kind on the city's own tree inventory, may be older still, but no record gives it an exact planting year.
Vancouver's heritage tree register is built from street addresses rather than a forest survey, so what it turns up are civic and institutional survivors: trees that outlasted the buildings or events around them rather than trees left standing in old growth. The magnolias at the Space Centre have the clearest paper trail of the four, a documented 1912 planting outside the old Vancouver Court House, a rescue from destruction in 1966, and a 1968 replanting in Vanier Park by the Park Board. The Comox Street wingnut carries no planting date at all, only a trunk thick enough, at 116.8 centimetres across, to be the widest of 43 wingnuts on the city's own street-tree inventory, which argues for real age without proving it. City Hall's oak has two competing origin stories that disagree by nine years and do not both hold up, and the Normal School Red Oak outside City Square Mall has no story at all beyond its species and address. All four are free to see.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.