Tree Facts

Banyan trees grow trunk-like roots from their branches.
A European chestnut known as the Tree of the Hundred Horses on Mt Etna in Sicily had a girth (the distance round the trunk) of 57.9 m during the 1790s.
General Sherman in California is the biggest living tree. It is a giant sequoia over 83 m tall and has a trunk measuring over 12 m in diameter.
The world’s oldest plant is the King’s Holly in southwestern Tasmania, thought to be 43,000 years old.
The ombu tree of Argentina is the world’s toughest tree, able to survive axes, fire, storms and insect attacks.
The biggest tree ever known was the Lindsey Creek Tree, a massive redwood which blew over in 1905. It weighed over 3300 tons.
The tallest living tree is the 112-m high Mendocino redwood tree, which is growing in the Montgomery State Reserve, California, United States.
The tallest tree ever known was a Eucalyptus on Watts River, Victoria, Australia, which was measured at over 150 m in 1872.
The great banyan tree in the Indian Botanical Garden, Calcutta, has a canopy that covers 1.2 hectares. The banyan tree or Indian fig tree has wide-spreading branches that send down hundreds of hanging roots. These take hold of the soil and act as supports for the branches.
A Moctezuma bald cypress is near Oaxaca in Mexico.

This entry is filed under Interesting Facts.