The Most Remarkable Trees in the United States
5 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable trees in the United States are General Sherman, Grizzly Giant and Lone Cypress. The list covers 5 trees. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The American West grows trees at the limits of what is possible. The giant sequoias of the Sierra Nevada are the most massive trees on Earth, coast redwoods are the tallest, and wind and salt along the Pacific shape survivors into sculptures. In the South, live oaks spread sideways rather than up, sending long limbs across the ground in the humid Lowcountry air.
General Sherman, a giant sequoia in Sequoia National Park, is the largest single-stem tree in the world by volume, its trunk about 11 metres across at the base. The Lone Cypress, a Monterey cypress clinging to a granite outcrop above the ocean at Pebble Beach, has become one of the most photographed trees in the country and an emblem of the Monterey coast. The Angel Oak on Johns Island near Charleston, South Carolina, is a southern live oak estimated to be several centuries old, its enormous limbs twisting out and resting on the ground to shade a wide circle around the trunk.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | General Sherman | Remarkable tree | |
| 2 | Grizzly Giant | Remarkable tree | |
| 3 | Lone Cypress | Remarkable tree | |
| 4 | General Grant Tree | Remarkable tree | |
| 5 | Angel Oak | Remarkable tree |
01 General Sherman
United States36.582° N 118.751° W
Roman Tokman · CC BY-SA 4.0 Giant Forest, at around 2,100 m, holds five of the ten largest trees in the world, and General Sherman is only the start. The Congress group of sequoias stands between the tree and the Giant Forest Museum, and nearby are Moro Rock, a granite dome climbed by a 351-step stairway built in the 1930s, and Crescent Meadow, the western trailhead of the High Sierra Trail to Mount Whitney.
Did you know? A mature giant sequoia adds so much wood each year that the annual growth alone would make an oak about 18 m tall and nearly a metre thick.
02 Grizzly Giant
United States37.504° N 119.601° W
Dietmar Rabich · CC BY-SA 4.0 Its name was given in 1859 by the publisher James Mason Hutchings, guided by Galen Clark, the settler who became the grove's first guardian. In the 1860s Carleton Watkins photographed it, and his mammoth-plate prints did much to convince doubting audiences in the East and in Europe that trees of this size really existed. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft both came to stand beneath it. Walk the full circle around the fence: the burned side and the living side look like two different trees, and the contrast is the clearest record of how a sequoia survives fire for three thousand years.
03 Lone Cypress
United States · 7.3 km from Monterey36.569° N 121.965° W
Image by sarahtipton79 from Pixabay Look for the way the trunk grips the rock and the cables and wall that quietly keep it there: the scene is both wild and carefully tended.
Did you know? The storm that tore off a large limb on 16 February 2019 was a Pineapple Express, a moisture-laden atmospheric river from near Hawaii.
04 General Grant Tree
General Grant
United States36.748° N 118.971° W
Eric Kilby from Somerville, MA, USA · CC BY-SA 2.0 The tree stands in the General Grant Grove, reached by a paved loop trail about a third of a mile long. Along the way you pass the Fallen Monarch, a sequoia hollowed by fire whose fallen trunk you can walk through, and the Gamlin Cabin, built in 1872 by the brothers Israel and Thomas Gamlin, who had filed a timber claim in the grove.
05 Angel Oak
United States32.718° N 80.079° W
Image by RegalShave from Pixabay The tree has had narrow escapes. Hurricane Hugo tore at it in 1989, and it recovered. The City of Charleston has owned the tree and the small park around it since 1991, and when housing development threatened the surrounding woodland, the Lowcountry Land Trust bought, in 2013, 17 adjacent acres to protect the oak's setting. In 2018 an acorn from the tree was germinated and planted, a "Baby Angel" to carry on its line. Standing under its canopy, where the branches bend down to the level of your head and then sweep away over the grass, it is easy to see why people treat it with something like reverence.
Did you know? The oak passed to Justus Angel through his marriage settlement with Martha Waight in 1810, and the Angel family held the land until the mid-1900s.
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 the United States?
- On our list, General Sherman ranks first, followed by Grizzly Giant and Lone Cypress.
- Is General Sherman the tallest tree in the world?
- No. General Sherman is the largest tree by volume, but the tallest trees are coast redwoods; the current record holder, Hyperion, stands over 115 metres tall in Redwood National Park.
- Where do Monterey cypresses grow in the wild?
- Native Monterey cypresses grow only in two small coastal groves on the Monterey Peninsula, at Cypress Point and Point Lobos, although the species is planted widely elsewhere.
- How many trees are on this list in the United States?
- The list covers 5 trees.