The widest tree on Earth has a trunk so large that early observers refused to believe it was a single organism.
El Arbol del Tule, a Montezuma cypress in Oaxaca, Mexico, has a trunk circumference of approximately 58 meters — nearly 190 feet around. For centuries, people assumed it must be several trees fused together, because a single tree with a trunk 36 feet wide seemed impossible. DNA analysis confirmed it is one organism.
It is estimated to be between 1,200 and 3,000 years old. Nobody agrees precisely because the rings in the oldest part of the heartwood are impossible to count: the core is too old to read cleanly, and the tree, as with all ancient trees, has already made its heartwood dead. What you can measure is the surface. The interior is beyond reckoning.
Local Zapotec oral history says the tree was planted by a priest of the wind god approximately 1,400 years ago. The tree was here before the Spanish arrived. It was here before the Aztec Empire was founded. It is still growing.
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