Residents To Pay $1 Million To Save Tree In Their City: Residents in the city of Toronto are going to dig deep into their pockets in order to save one tree.Saving it will put the townsfolk on the hook for nearly a million dollars as it's one of the city’s oldest trees. A massive red oak, estimated to be around 350 years old, continues to grow in the backyard of a local home. The city has agreed to pay half the cost to save the tree by buying the house it resides on, but residents would need to fork out another $430,000 in donations by December 12, 2020, to save the oak. Officials say the tree could end up living a few more hundred years.