The Most Remarkable Trees in North America
6 places in 2 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable trees in North America are General Sherman (United States), Árbol del Tule (Mexico) and Grizzly Giant (United States). The list covers 6 trees in 2 countries. The United States has the most, with 5. Last updated 14 October 2026.
North America holds both extremes of tree life. On the western slope of California's Sierra Nevada, deep snowpack feeds the giant sequoia, whose thick, tannin-rich bark lets it survive the fires that clear its competitors, so a single trunk can keep adding wood for thousands of years. A few hundred kilometres east, in the dry, cold White Mountains, the Great Basin bristlecone pine does the opposite: it grows so slowly on thin dolomite soil that its dense wood barely decays. Further south, Mexico's Montezuma cypresses drink from springs and river margins and swell into trunks of extraordinary girth.
Here you will find General Sherman in Sequoia National Park, the largest single-stem tree on Earth by volume, and the General Grant Tree in Kings Canyon, designated the Nation's Christmas Tree. The Grizzly Giant stands in Yosemite's Mariposa Grove, gnarled and leaning after millennia of storms. Methuselah, a bristlecone pine more than 4,800 years old, grows on a high ridge in the Inyo National Forest, its exact position deliberately kept unmarked.
Other trees here are remarkable for character rather than size. The Árbol del Tule in Santa María del Tule, Oaxaca, has one of the stoutest trunks of any tree in the world. The Lone Cypress clings to a granite outcrop above the Pacific on the Monterey Peninsula, and the Angel Oak, a southern live oak on Johns Island near Charleston, spreads its limbs along the ground in a canopy wider than it is tall.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | General Sherman | Remarkable tree | United States | |
| 2 | Árbol del Tule | Remarkable tree | Mexico | |
| 3 | Grizzly Giant | Remarkable tree | United States | |
| 4 | Lone Cypress | Remarkable tree | United States | |
| 5 | General Grant Tree | Remarkable tree | United States | |
| 6 | Angel Oak | Remarkable tree | United States |
01 General Sherman
United States36.582° N 118.751° W
Roman Tokman · CC BY-SA 4.0 Standing at its foot is less about reading numbers than about losing a sense of scale. The trunk rises almost without taper, a column of reddish bark, and the crown is so high above that it is hard to take in. In January 2006 the tree dropped its biggest branch, a limb more than 2 m thick and over 30 m long, which smashed part of the fence and cratered the paved path around the base; nobody saw it fall. In September 2021, when the KNP Complex Fire threatened the grove, crews wrapped the base of the trunk in foil fire shelter material, and the tree came through unharmed.
Did you know? In lumber terms the tree holds about 630,000 board feet, which the park service reckons would be enough to build some 120 average houses.
02 Árbol del Tule
Mexico · 5.4 km from Oaxaca de Juárez17.047° N 96.636° W
Image by 12019 from Pixabay Nobody knows exactly how old it is. Estimates run from 1,200 to 3,000 years, with the best estimate from growth rates at roughly 1,433 to 1,600 years. Zapotec tradition holds that it was planted some 1,400 years ago by Pechocha, a priest of the wind god Ehécatl, which agrees surprisingly well with the science. Other local stories say the town sits on a hidden lake and that the tree acts as its stopper — if it ever dies, the water will return.
Did you know? Its smoothed-out trunk diameter of about 9.38 metres only narrowly beats the stoutest known giant sequoia, at about 8.90 metres.
03 Grizzly Giant
United States37.504° N 119.601° W
Dietmar Rabich · CC BY-SA 4.0 Current estimates put its age at about 3,000 years, give or take two and a half centuries; nineteenth-century enthusiasts guessed at many times that. The tree's scars tell the story of those millennia. Fire has consumed most of its bark and sapwood on one side, and in a single storm in 1942 it was struck by lightning six times. It has been protected by a fence since 1912 to stop visitors trampling its shallow roots and stripping its bark, and during the Washburn Fire of 2022 park crews ran sprinklers around it.
04 Lone Cypress
United States · 7.3 km from Monterey36.569° N 121.965° W
Image by sarahtipton79 from Pixabay Monterey cypress is a rare tree in the wild: its natural range today is just two small relict groves near Carmel, one at Point Lobos and the other at Cypress Point, a short way along this same shore. It is the constant sea wind that gives old specimens their flattened, sculptural shape. The exact age of this one is unknown; it is thought to have taken root around the middle of the eighteenth century. That would make it unusually old for its species, whose longest documented life is under three centuries, which is part of why the tree has been nursed so carefully.
Did you know? Pebble Beach Company has maintained that its 1919 trademark protects not only the drawing of the tree but the tree itself.
05 General Grant Tree
General Grant
United States36.748° N 118.971° W
Eric Kilby from Somerville, MA, USA · CC BY-SA 2.0 What strikes a visitor is less its height than its mass. The trunk rises like a cinnamon-coloured column of fibrous, fire-scarred bark, barely tapering for dozens of metres, with a broad, rounded crown of heavy limbs far above. Giant sequoias depend on fire to open their cones and clear the ground for seedlings, and the thick spongy bark lets them survive burns that kill other trees; the scars on the Grant show fires it has lived through. In 2003 it climbed one place in the size rankings when fire caused by lightning destroyed the crown of the Washington Tree, which had been larger.
06 Angel Oak
United States32.718° N 80.079° W
Image by RegalShave from Pixabay How old it is nobody knows. Far greater ages have been claimed and are still repeated, but estimates of about 400 to 500 years are more widely accepted, and even those are debated. The name comes not from the heavens but from Justus Angel and his wife Martha Waight Tucker Angel, former owners of the land. Local folklore, rooted in the plantation history of the island, adds another layer: stories tell of the ghosts of enslaved people appearing around the tree as angels.
Did you know? The tree stands on land that formed part of a 96-acre grant to the colonist Abraham Waight in 1717, and stayed with his descendants for four generations.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most remarkable trees in North America?
- On our list, General Sherman (United States) ranks first, followed by Árbol del Tule (Mexico) and Grizzly Giant (United States).
- Which country has the most trees in North America?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (5) and Mexico (1).
- What is the largest tree in the world?
- By volume, the largest known single-stem tree is General Sherman, a giant sequoia in California's Sequoia National Park. Taller trees and wider trunks exist, but none combines height and girth into as much wood.
- How old is the Methuselah tree?
- Methuselah is a Great Basin bristlecone pine in California's White Mountains whose age, counted from a core sample, is more than 4,800 years, making it one of the oldest known non-clonal trees.
- Why is the Árbol del Tule so wide?
- The Árbol del Tule is a Montezuma cypress, a species that grows near water and develops a buttressed, deeply fluted trunk. Its girth is so great that it was once suspected to be several trees fused together, but genetic testing showed it is a single tree.
- How many trees are on this list in North America?
- The list covers 6 trees in 2 countries. The United States has the most, with 5.