How wonderful to know that these venerable giants share the planet with us. Long may they continue to do so! https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/trees-woods-and-wildlife/british-trees/tree-of-the-year The role of trees like these in concrete environments is often overlooked. A city without trees is a city without birds, without autumn leaves to crunch, without new green to welcome spring, without somewhere to climb, to hide, to lean, to kiss, to cry, to sleep, to make memories. There’s a growing body of evidence to show how time spent with trees improves our wellbeing, to say little of what services they provide for us, too. These giants bring our concrete spaces to life. We rely on them, but they need us to raise a voice if they are to survive. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/16/urban-trees-axe-champions-nature
There's a problem these days with numbers of old looking trees being assigned often quite high ages without supporting evidence when featured on web sites and social media - if there is no basis for saying an individual tree is definitely a particular age then there is also none for indicating an approximate one. How Old Is That Tree? (conifers.org)
In the news today: First person: The quest for an ancient colossus, in the wild rainforest of B.C. (cheknews.ca)
The oldest recorded tree, on Canoe Creek in Olympic National Forest, was cored and provided a ring count of 1460 years (pers. comm. Robert Van Pelt, 1999.07.28). There is also a record of 1212 years for a partial sample from a tree at Cheewhat Lake, Pacific Rim National Park, BC, collected by Randy Stoltmann (Van Pelt 1998). In general, there are not many data for this species; the largest and presumably oldest trees represent complex growth patterns on many different buttresses, and accurately determining the age of most old trees would require a complete stump section and a lengthy exercise in measurement and crossdating--assuming that the central part of the tree had not rotted away, as it often has. Thuja plicata (western redcedar) description (conifers.org)