Five trees, and three of them are groves, because that is how Austin's oldest survived. A live oak downtown lived through a deliberate poisoning in 1989. A block away is the grove the city was auctioned beneath in 1839, which is why Republic Square exists. Three more stand on the university's original forty acres, argued out of a building plan by a professor of Classics. Those three make an easy afternoon on foot. Two are worth the drive: a bald cypress a Spanish priest wrote about in 1716, and a grove where a settler was killed fighting behind a trunk.
0 of 5 visited in Austin
1
The Treaty Oak
Texas Live Oak (Quercus fusiformis) · about 500 years · West Line Historic District
In 1989 a man poured enough Velpar herbicide around the roots of this tree to kill roughly a hundred trees. Austin reacted the way few cities react to an assault on a plant. Children taped notes to the trunk, arborists rigged a screen to shade it through the summer, and crews dug out the poisoned soil and fed what was left. Two thirds of the tree died anyway and more than half the crown had to come off. The rest of it held on, and in 1997 it set acorns again.
What survived is a Texas live oak of around five hundred years, now permanently one sided. Local tribes are said to have called it the father of the forest, and tradition puts Stephen F. Austin under it signing his first boundary agreement with them, though that part is story rather than record. What is measured is the spread: before the poisoning its branches reached thirty nine metres across.
It has its own small park, which is the tell. A city does not buy a block of land in the middle of downtown for a tree it thinks is ordinary.
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2
The Auction Oaks
Live Oak (Quercus sp.) · at least 190 years, and already large in the 1830s · Downtown
In August 1839 the lots of a city that did not yet exist were sold in the shade of these trees. Judge Edwin Waller had staked out the grid that spring and held back the best ground for the capitol. The rest went under the hammer here: two hundred and seventeen lots, three hundred thousand dollars, which covered the public buildings of the new Texas capital. The grove is the reason this square exists.
Then the twentieth century happened to it. For decades the square was a parking lot with asphalt run right up to the trunks, which is close to the worst thing you can do to a live oak, and the trees came through anyway. The city rebuilt the square in 2017 and they now stand in open ground again.
Aim for the southwest corner. The square is a single block and the grove is unmistakable once you are inside it.
One thing nobody has settled is which live oak these are. Central Texas has two that look much the same, and the sources that tell the auction story do not name the species. If you know, tell us.
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3
The Battle Oaks
Texas Live Oak (Quercus fusiformis) · 250 to 300 years · University of Texas
Three live oaks stand on the rise at the north end of the original forty acres, and they were there before the university was. When the University of Texas opened in 1883 they were already old, the survivors of a larger grove. The story told on campus is that the rest came down during the Civil War, cut to raise a fortification when word arrived that Union troops had reached Galveston, and that these three were left.
They nearly went in 1923 instead, when the site was picked for the Biology building. William Battle, a professor of Classics chairing the faculty building committee, argued them out of the plan. They carry his name rather than the war's, which seems like the right outcome.
The university puts the group at two hundred and fifty to three hundred years and reckons the largest predates the Civil War outright, making them among the oldest living things on campus. A plaque at the foot tells the whole thing in fewer words than this.
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4
Old Baldy
Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) · more than 500 years · Southeast Austin
Father Antonio Olivares, the Franciscan who later founded San Antonio, wrote about this cypress in 1716. It was old then. Texas Parks and Wildlife calls it the oldest bald cypress on public land in the state and dates it past five hundred years, with some accounts reaching five hundred and fifty.
It stands where Onion Creek runs through the park, thirty one metres tall on a trunk just under five metres round, big enough that it now houses other things: nesting birds, ball moss, vines working up the bark. Bald cypress is a conifer that drops its needles, so the tree is bare through winter and turns rust orange before it goes, which is the week to come if you want the colour.
Onion Creek has flooded around the trunk in 1869, in 2013 and again in 2015. Each time the water went down and the tree was where it had been. Take the Rock Shelter Trail northeast from the main parking area; it is signposted, and there is no mistaking it when you arrive.
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5
The Seiders Oaks
Live Oak (Quercus sp.) · at least 190 years, and already large in the 1830s · Shoal Creek
In the spring of 1842 Gideon White was out looking for livestock when riders caught him in the open. He got a tree between himself and them and fought from behind it, killing at least one before they killed him. The bullet holes and arrow marks stayed visible in the bark for decades afterwards.
Four years later his daughter Louisa married Edward Seiders, an Austin grocer, and for a while the couple lived in her father's cabin by the spring. The spring took the family name and so did the grove. The Seiders then did something that reads oddly now and worked completely: they built bath houses, picnic tables and a dance pavilion along the creek to get Austin to come out and use the place. Austin came, and has not really stopped.
Four big live oaks stand together in the middle of the greenbelt, reachable on paved path from either end. The Texas Forest Service notes they were already large when the city was being laid out in the 1830s, which puts them past two centuries and probably well past.
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