Missouri Botanical 
Garden Bulletin 
Vol. IV St. Louis, Mo., December, 1916 | No. 12 
THE OLDEST LIVING TREE IN THE WORLD 
_ Large trees have from time immemorial excited the 
interest and admiration of man. In Europe many trees of 
extraordinary size have been objects of curiosity to travelers, 
while in this country the great size and age of the giant 
redwoods of California have been the subject of frequent 
investigations and descriptions, notably by Muir, Dudley, 
and Huntington. 
It is not so generally known, however, that trees belong- 
ing to a closely allied species, the bald cypress, attain an 
age equal to, and in one case certainly ing, that of 
any known redwood. The redwood and the bald cypress 
flourished during the same prehistoric periods, and were 
widely distributed not only in this country, but in Europe. 
At the present time, however, each is restricted to a limited 
area in the United States—the two species of redwood, to 
California, and the bald cypress, to narrow strips along the 
Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, extending a short dis- 
tance up the Mississippi Valley. A third related genus, 
Glyptostrobus, is now confined to a narrow region in south- 
east China. Although many of the cypress trees now grow- 
ing in our southern swamps are very old, there are prob- 
atiy very few that even approach the of the giant red- 
woods of California, and we must go to Mexico to find what 
is probably the oldest living tree in the world. There are 
a number of extraordinary specimens of the cypress tree in 
southern Mexico, some of which have attracted the atten- 
tion of travelers and have been referred to in their writings. 
It is one of these which is the subject of this sketch. 
In 1803, Alexander von Humboldt, during his travels 
through southern Mexico, came across an enormous cypress 
tree. He says of it: “In the vill of Santa Maria del 
Tule, 22 km. east of the capital of Oaxaca, between Santa 
Lucia and Tlacochiguaya, there is an enormous trunk of a 
Cupressus disticha-(sabino), which has a circumference of 
36 metres. This old tree is accordingly very much eg 
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