Scientific surveys have recently estimated as many as three trillion trees grow all over the world. But out of that mind-boggling number, only a handful of specimens are majestic enough to be considered iconic. The tree with the largest trunk girth on earth, El Arbol del Tule, grows in a church courtyard in the small village of Santa Maria del Tule in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.
Certainly there are taller trees, ones with a larger volumes of wood, and others thought to be older, but none has the immense girth of El Tule (too-lay), which is estimated to have a circumference of more than 160 feet and a diameter of more than 38 feet. Scientists and arborists who have studied El Tule estimate it to be between 1,200 and 1,600 years old.