The evil tree event from Runescape came out a few days ago and Delarue64 and I tried it recently. Amazingly we had 2 Elder trees in a row. They are the toughest trees to kill.
You find out about the evil trees by talking to a spirit tree. They 1st tell you about a sappling and then give a clue to the whereabouts. For the 1st tree the clue was something like “the southern coast of a tropical island”. This turned out to be on Ape Atoll. The 2nd tree gave a clue something like “near a runecrafting altar”. This tree was near the body altar.
Here are some pictures Delarue64 took when a sapling was being nurtured at McGrubor’s woods, the sapling ended up being a willow tree. They show all the stages of a sapling. He didn’t nurture the sapling as he didn’t want to take the risk of getting a low tree, nurturing trees counts as one of your daily trees. 
This is the first stage of the sapling, when you first find it.
This is the second stage of the sapling, before it turns into a young tree.
This is the first stage of a young tree, when it just transforms from a sapling.
This is the final stage for the sapling before it turns into an evil tree, this is the 2nd stage of a young tree.
After a couple of minutes or so, the sappling develops into an evil tree and the spirit tree then gives and option to teleport to it. Below is a picture of us at the Elder Evil tree at Ape Atoll. In fact I was the 1st person to find it on this occasion. I was hoping for a reward similar to shooting stars, but that did not happen, lol.
If you try to cut the tree near the roots, then the roots will knock you away from it. So you either have to move away or chop the roots.
One thing to note about this location is that poisonous spiders possibly attack you if you do not wear the monkey gree gree. Delarue64 got attacked and had to come back with some anti-poison pots. So one must be careful what you bring to an evil tree. It could possibly take you to a dangerous location.
This was the 1st Evil Tree that we found, which was located at Ape Atoll. It was an Elder Tree.
An Elder Tree requires 85 wood cutting and/or 85 firemaking. That meant that I could not burn the tree, because I had less than 85 fire making, but Delarue64 could. Below is a picture of Delarue64 burning the tree at the 2nd location (near the mind altar). In order to burn the tree, you need to have some kindling from chopping down one of the roots. You then click on “light fire” as shown below. You can have up to 8 fires per Elder Tree and it gave Delarue64 about 16,000 fire experience for all 8 fires. I also got about 14,000 woodcutting xp from chopping the tree.
A ring of fire around the Evil Elder Tree
When the tree is dead, you can claim your rewards. The rewards differ for everyone, but I got 74 mahogany logs, 1 maple tree seed and some coins for the 1st tree and below is a picture of the rewards from the second tree.
Here is the rewards that I got from the Evil Elder Tree
On top of those rewards the leprechaun gives you a great bonus that can be seen below.
This bonus is pretty cool. You can keep cutting trees without having to bank.
Below is a picture of delarue64 and me cutting willows and taking advantage of the free banking time.
You can see stars above my bald head after a willow log gets sent directly to my bank. In the meantime, the bottom right hand side shows a burning log from Delarue64's inferno adze.
It seems like this is good experience and worth while. I got a further 21k xp from cutting willows in the 21 minutes. The bad news is that only 2 trees can be cut in a day. It might be worth joining a evil tree clan chat to alert you about upcoming evil trees. I did notice that there was a clan “tree find” that seemed to be active. Happy evil tree hunting. 
Updates:
The spirit trees now give more information on the timing of the evil tree sprouting. The spirit tree now tells you the time it will take to sprout… over 1 hour, over half an hour, under half an hour, less than 15 minutes, about to sprout, a sappling has sprouted and the evil tree is ready to dispatch. The 2 most popular evil tree clans are “eviltreechat” and “treehunters”.
When there a sappling has sprouted, the spirit tree will give you a clue to its whereabouts. After a while you will get used to the locations, although I tend to wait at the spirit tree for a free teleport most of the time.
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