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100 free Trees trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
10 free Trees trivia questions with answers. Trees trivia lives in two places on BrainPickle. This page is the shorter set; the main quiz is Trees and Forests trivia, with our deepest question pool on the topic and a source behind every answer.
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Q 01What process do trees use to convert sunlight into energy?
Photosynthesis
Photosynthesis is the process by which green plants, including trees, use sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to create glucose (sugar) for food and release oxygen as a byproduct.
Q 02What term describes trees and shrubs that seasonally shed all their leaves, usually in autumn?
Deciduous
Deciduous, from Latin deciduus, 'falling off': deciduous trees such as oaks and maples drop all their leaves each autumn, whereas evergreens such as pines keep foliage year-round.
Q 03Roughly how old is Methuselah, the Great Basin bristlecone pine in California's White Mountains?
Over 4,600 years
Over 4,600 years: Edmund Schulman's 1957 core sample dated Methuselah at about 4,789 years old then, putting its germination near 2830 BCE. Prometheus, felled in 1964, was at least 4,862.
Q 04What part of a tree primarily transports water and nutrients from the roots to the leaves?
Xylem
The xylem is a vascular tissue in trees that forms a network of tubes, primarily responsible for conducting water and dissolved minerals upwards from the roots to the rest of the plant, including the leaves.
Q 05Which common product is primarily made from wood pulp?
Paper
Bleaching the pulp is what gives paper its whiteness, a property the trade treats as distinct from brightness.
Q 06What science dates a tree's growth rings to the exact year they formed?
Dendrochronology
Dendrochronology matches ring-width patterns across samples to assign each ring a calendar year; A. E. Douglass founded the method at the University of Arizona in the early 1900s.
Q 07Which species includes the tallest living trees on Earth, reaching over 115 metres?
Coast redwood
The species has a small natural range and an extremely long lifespan, and many of the biggest individuals carry official names of their own.
Q 08General Sherman, the largest known living single-stem tree by volume, is which species?
Giant sequoia
Giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum): General Sherman, in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park, California, has a trunk volume of about 1,487 cubic metres and stands about 84 metres tall.
Q 09Which living plant tissue carries sugars made in photosynthesis out to the rest of the plant?
Phloem
The process is called translocation, and it is carried out by cells known as sieve tube elements.
Q 10Which evergreen tree's thick outer bark is stripped every nine to twelve years without harming it?
Cork oak
Cork oak bark can be harvested every nine to twelve years without harming the tree once it is about 25 years old; it also goes into flooring.
Q 11Genomic analysis suggests the baobab genus originated on which island, home to six of its eight species?
Madagascar
Madagascar: six of the eight Adansonia species are endemic to the island, and a 2024 genome study in Nature traced the genus's origin there, with later dispersal to mainland Africa and Australia.
Q 12Pando, often called the world's heaviest single organism, is a Utah clonal colony of which tree?
Quaking aspen
Quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides): Pando's roughly 47,000 genetically identical stems share one root system covering about 106 acres of Fishlake National Forest, Utah, with a total mass estimated near 6,000 tonnes.
Q 13Six ginkgo trees famously survived which 1945 event while growing 1 to 2 km from its centre?
Q 21Jōmon Sugi, an ancient cryptomeria possibly over 7,000 years old, grows on which Japanese island?
Yakushima
Yakushima: Jōmon Sugi grows at about 1,300 metres on the island south of Kyushu, with a trunk girth of 16.4 metres; age estimates range from 2,170 to over 7,000 years, and Yakushima became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993.
Q 22The Tree of Ténéré, once the most isolated tree on Earth, was knocked down in 1973 by what?
A truck
A truck: in 1973 a reportedly drunk Libyan truck driver hit the lone acacia in Niger's Ténéré desert, a tree so well known it appeared on Michelin maps at 1:4,000,000; its remains went to the national museum in Niamey.
Q 23The Sycamore Gap tree, illegally felled in 2023, stood beside which ancient structure?
The Hiroshima atomic bomb
The Hiroshima atomic bomb: six ginkgos within about 2 km of the hypocentre, including one at Hosen-bo temple, survived the 6 August 1945 blast and are counted among the city's hibakujumoku, the survivor trees.
Q 14The banyan fig is the national tree of which country?
India
India's national tree is the banyan, Ficus benghalensis, whose species name refers to Bengal; it spreads by aerial prop roots that thicken into new trunks, and the name banyan is applied to all figs with that habit.
Q 15Hyperion, the tallest known living tree at nearly 116 metres, was discovered in which year?
2006
2006: Chris Atkins and Michael Taylor found Hyperion on 25 August 2006 in a remote part of Redwood National Park, California; it measured 115.55 metres then, and later surveys put it near 116 metres.
Q 16Which Canadian province, on its own, accounts for about 72% of the world's maple syrup output?
Quebec
Quebec alone produces 72% of global output; maples are usually tapped only once they reach 30 to 40 years old, and Canadian syrup must be at least 66% sugar.
Q 17'True cinnamon', Cinnamomum verum, takes its trade name Ceylon from which country?
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka was called Ceylon until 1972, and Cinnamomum verum is native to the island; most cinnamon in international commerce is actually cassia from other Cinnamomum species, all of it harvested as inner bark.
Q 18Which Caribbean tree, the 'little apple of death', blisters skin if you stand under it in rain?
Manchineel
Manchineel (Hippomane mancinella), Spanish 'manzanilla de la muerte': its milky sap blisters skin, so rain dripping through the canopy burns. Every part is toxic, yet its roots stabilise Caribbean beaches and Florida lists it as endangered.
Q 19The Major Oak, folklore's shelter for Robin Hood and his Merry Men, stands in which English woodland?
Sherwood Forest
Sherwood Forest's Major Oak, near Edwinstowe in Nottinghamshire, is an English oak estimated at 800 to 1,000 years old with a trunk girth of about 10 metres; its heavy limbs have been propped with supports since 1908.
Q 20Old Tjikko, a clonal spruce roughly 9,550 years old, grows in which country?
Sweden
Sweden: Old Tjikko, a Norway spruce on Fulufjället in Dalarna, has a root system carbon-dated to about 9,550 years; its visible trunk is only a few centuries old, regrown from roots that survived since the last ice age.
Hadrian's Wall
Hadrian's Wall: the sycamore stood in a dip beside the wall near Crag Lough, Northumberland, featured in 1991's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and won England Tree of the Year in 2016; the stump sent up new shoots in 2024.
Q 24The Wollemi pine, known only from fossils until 1994, grows wild in which country?
Australia
Australia: David Noble found the Wollemi pine in 1994 in sandstone gorges of Wollemi National Park, about 150 km north-west of Sydney; fewer than a hundred mature trees survive there and the species is critically endangered.
Q 25The dragon blood tree, named for its red resin, is the national tree of which country?
Yemen
Yemen: Dracaena cinnabari is endemic to the Socotra archipelago in the Arabian Sea, governed by Yemen; its upturned umbrella crown catches mist, and its red resin was traded for centuries as 'dragon's blood' dye and medicine.
Q 26El Árbol del Tule, the tree with the world's stoutest trunk, grows in which country?
Mexico
Mexico: El Árbol del Tule, a Montezuma cypress, stands in the churchyard of Santa María del Tule, Oaxaca; its trunk measured 42 metres around in 2005, and its Nahuatl name ahuehuete is usually glossed as 'old man of the water'.
Q 27Dutch elm disease is caused by a fungus spread from tree to tree by which insects?
Bark beetles
Bark beetles: elm bark beetles of the genus Scolytus carry spores of the Ophiostoma fungus from breeding galleries in dead elm bark to healthy trees; the disease is named for the Dutch scientists who identified it from 1921.
Q 28The Angel Oak, a 400 to 500-year-old southern live oak, stands near which US city?
Charleston
Charleston: the Angel Oak stands on Johns Island, South Carolina, about 12 miles from downtown Charleston; its longest branch stretches 187 feet and its canopy shades about 17,200 square feet.
Q 29Eucalyptus deglupta, with its multicoloured peeling bark, is the only eucalypt native to which habitat?
Rainforest
Rainforest: Eucalyptus deglupta grows in humid lowland rainforest of the Philippines, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, the only eucalypt that usually lives in rainforest and the only one whose natural range crosses into the Northern Hemisphere.
Q 30Protestant Christians in Livonia, now Estonia and Latvia, and which other Central European region developed the decorated Christmas tree?
Germany
Germany's early trees were hung with paper roses, apples and wafers, and Moravian Christians added candles.