What is the oldest tree in York?

York Museum Gardens holds an unusual concentration of record-holding trees for a garden of only ten acres. The Yorkshire Philosophical Society leased the land in the 1820s and laid the gardens out around the ruins of the dissolved St Mary's Abbey, planting it over the following decades with specimens gathered from across the world as the society's museum and observatory grew up alongside them. Six of those trees are now listed by the Tree Register, the national body that verifies Britain's largest and oldest specimens, as Yorkshire county champions, meaning no larger example of their kind has been recorded anywhere else in the county. The Willow-Leaved Ash is the tallest and, by the Tree Register's own estimate, the oldest of the six, its upper crown now dying back the way an ageing ash typically declines. The other five, a hollow-trunked hornbeam, a two-species grafted beech, a feathery-leaved alder by the river, a leaning Anatolian pear and Britain's only native lime, share the same estimated 80 to 150 year range and the same free, level, ten-acre garden, a short walk from York railway station and open every day of the year.