Trees
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150 free Trees trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 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 uses sunlight, water and carbon dioxide to build sugars; the oxygen that trees release is a by-product, split off from the water rather than the carbon dioxide.
Q 02What term describes trees and shrubs that seasonally shed all their leaves, usually in autumn?
Deciduous
Deciduous, from the Latin for 'falling off': trees such as oaks and maples drop their leaves to save water and get through winter, then have to regrow all their foliage in spring.
Q 03A California bristlecone pine more than 4,600 years old is named after which biblical figure?
Methuselah
Methuselah takes its name from the Bible's longest-lived man, said to have reached 969; the pine's exact spot in the White Mountains has long been kept quiet to protect it from damage.
Q 04What part of a tree primarily transports water and nutrients from the roots to the leaves?
Xylem
Xylem carries water and dissolved minerals up from the roots; as a tree thickens, its older xylem cells die and harden into the heartwood that holds the trunk up.
Q 05Which common product is primarily made from wood pulp?
Paper
Paper was made mostly from rags until the 1840s, when a shortage of them pushed inventors on both sides of the Atlantic to pulp wood instead.
Q 06What science dates a tree's growth rings to the exact year they formed?
Dendrochronology
Dendrochronology was founded by Andrew Douglass, an astronomer who began collecting tree rings in the hope that their widths would record the sunspot cycle.
Q 07Which species includes the tallest living trees on Earth, reaching over 115 metres?
Coast redwood
Coast redwood grows only in a narrow strip along the Pacific coast of California and Oregon, where summer fog drips from the crowns and keeps the trees moist through the dry season.
Q 08General Sherman, the largest known living single-stem tree by volume, is which species?
Giant sequoia
Giant sequoia: General Sherman, in California's Sequoia National Park, holds about 1,487 cubic metres of wood, and in 2021 firefighters wrapped its base in protective foil as a wildfire closed in.
Q 09Which living plant tissue carries sugars made in the leaves out to the rest of the tree?
Phloem
Phloem is the inner layer of the bark, which is why girdling, cutting a ring of bark right around the trunk, starves the roots of sugar and kills the tree.
Q 10Which evergreen tree's thick outer bark is stripped every nine to twelve years without harming it?
Cork oak
Cork oak bark grows back after every stripping, so a tree that can live for two centuries is harvested again and again, mostly to make wine stoppers.
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: Pando's roughly 47,000 stems are one genetic individual joined by a single root system in Utah's Fishlake National Forest, where fences now keep deer and elk off its new shoots.
Q 13Six ginkgo trees famously survived which 1945 event while growing 1 to 2 km from its centre?
Q 21Jōmon Sugi, a cedar possibly over 7,000 years old, grows on which Japanese island, whose forests inspired Princess Mononoke?
Yakushima
Yakushima: the tree drew wide notice only in the 1960s, and its discovery spurred moves to protect the island's ancient cedar forests.
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 driver struck the lone acacia, a landmark so well known that it was marked on 1:4,000,000 maps; its remains now stand at the national museum in Niamey.
Q 23The Sycamore Gap tree, illegally felled in 2023, stood beside which ancient structure?
Hadrian's Wall
The Hiroshima atomic bomb
The Hiroshima atomic bomb charred six ginkgos growing 1 to 2 km from the blast, yet they soon recovered and are still alive, signposted today as hibakujumoku, survivor trees.
Q 14The banyan fig is the national tree of which country?
India
India's national tree is the banyan, whose branches drop aerial roots that thicken into new trunks, so that one tree can in time look like a dense thicket.
Q 15Hyperion, the tallest known living tree, shares its name with which kind of Greek mythical figure?
Titan
Titan: in Greek myth Hyperion was the Titan father of the sun, moon and dawn; the tree was found in 2006, and the park later closed the area because visitors had trampled the plants around its base.
Q 16Which Canadian province produces more than two-thirds of the world's maple syrup?
Quebec
Quebec's producers keep a strategic reserve of syrup, and over several months in 2011 and 2012 thieves drained nearly 3,000 tonnes from it, worth about C$18.7 million.
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, an ancient tree declared dead in 2026, stands in which English woodland?
Sherwood Forest
Sherwood Forest's Major Oak, by legend the hideout of Robin Hood and his outlaws, failed to leaf in 2026 after years of decline; its trunk will be left standing as a home for wildlife.
Q 20Old Tjikko, a clonal spruce roughly 9,550 years old, grows in which country?
Sweden
Sweden: Old Tjikko's roots on Fulufjället mountain were carbon-dated to about 9,550 years, though its trunk is only a few centuries old, and its discoverers named it after their late dog.
Hadrian's Wall: the sycamore stood in a dip beside the wall and appeared in 1991's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves; two men were jailed in 2025 for felling it, and its stump has since sent up new shoots.
Q 24The Wollemi pine, known only from fossils until 1994, grows wild in which country?
Australia
Australia: the only wild Wollemi pines grow in a gorge whose location is kept secret, and during the 2019–20 bushfires specialist firefighters ran an operation to irrigate and save the grove.
Q 25The dragon blood tree, named for its red resin, is the national tree of which country?
Yemen
Yemen: the tree grows wild only on Socotra, a Yemeni island group in the Arabian Sea, and its dark red resin was prized across the ancient world as 'dragon's blood', used as both a dye and a 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 in a church's grounds in Oaxaca, is so broad that it was long thought to be several trees, until DNA tests showed it is a single individual.
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 sprawling southern live oak, stands near which US city?
Charleston
Charleston: the Angel Oak, on nearby Johns Island, owes its name to no angel but to Justus and Martha Angel, whose estate it grew on; the city has owned the tree since 1991.
Q 29Eucalyptus deglupta, with its multicoloured peeling bark, is the only eucalypt that usually grows in which habitat?
Rainforest
Rainforest: this rainbow eucalyptus of the Philippines, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea sheds its orange-tinted bark in strips, and the layers beneath show as streaks of green, red, orange, grey and purple.
Q 30Protestants in Livonia and which other country developed the custom of bringing decorated Christmas trees indoors?
Germany
Germany's early trees were hung with apples, wafers and sweets, and it was Queen Victoria's German-born husband, Prince Albert, who made the tree fashionable in Britain in the 1840s.