The Biggest and Oldest Plants in the World

Plants can be HUGE

Plants come in every size. Some are so tiny you can hardly see them. Others are the biggest living things on the whole planet. Let's meet some record-breaking plants!

The tallest tree of all 🌲

The tallest plant in the world is a kind of tree called a giant redwood. These trees grow in America, and they are taller than a tall building. One redwood is so tall that if you stood lots and lots of children on each other's shoulders, you still could not reach the top!

Redwoods are also very wide. Some are so big around the trunk that a car could drive through a hole in one. And here is the amazing part: every giant redwood grew from one tiny seed, smaller than your fingernail. You can read how this happens in How Trees Grow.

The oldest plants of all ⏳

Some plants are not just big — they are very, very old.

There is a kind of tree called a bristlecone pine. It grows high up on cold, rocky mountains. The oldest one is thousands of years old! It was already an old tree before there were cars, before there were castles, even before many cities were built. It is much, much older than your grandparents, and older than their grandparents too.

Trees grow slowly, a little bit every year, so the very old ones have been growing for a long, long time.

A flower as big as a wheel 🌸

Not all giant plants are trees. There is a flower called the rafflesia that grows deep in the rainforest. It is as big as a car wheel — the biggest single flower in the world! But watch out: it smells like rotten meat. That stinky smell brings flies to the flower, which helps it make seeds. You can learn how flowers do this in Flowers and Pollination.

And the tiniest plants 🔬

Plants can be teeny-tiny too. A little floating plant called duckweed grows on top of ponds. Each plant is smaller than a grain of rice! Lots of them together can cover a whole pond in green.

So plants can be giant like a redwood, or tiny like duckweed. Isn't that amazing?

Why this is wonderful 🌎

The biggest and oldest plants help us see how special nature is. A giant redwood gives a home to birds, bugs and squirrels. An old tree has lived through thousands of winters and summers. These plants remind us to look after trees and the wild places where they grow.

Activity: measure a giant

You can find out how tall and old a tree near you is!

1. Find a tree near your home, school or park.
2. Hug the tree, or use a long piece of string to measure around the trunk. The bigger around it is, the older it usually is.
3. Lie down on the grass and look all the way up to the top. Is it taller than your house?
4. Draw the tree as big as you can, and count how many of you it would take, standing on each other, to reach the top.

Every big tree was once a tiny seed. With time, water and sunshine, look how huge it grew!