The Sunset Valley Bigelow Oak

The national champion Bigelow oak stands in a city that sits entirely inside another city. Sunset Valley is an incorporated enclave with Austin on every side, and the tree grows on its conservation land beside Williamson Creek. Set the yardstick before the numbers. The Bigelow oak, also called white shin oak, is a small-tree oak, so this is not a giant by the standards of oaks in general. It is a giant by the standards of its own kind. Nominated to the Texas Big Tree Registry in February 1999 and remeasured in June 2024, it came in at 315 centimetres round, 13.4 metres tall and about 13 metres across the crown, which makes it the state and national champion for its variety. The town knows what it has. Sunset Valley's public works department lists a champion Bigelow oak among the things the city is home to, though it uses an older botanical name, Quercus durandii, where the registry files the tree as a variety of Quercus sinuata. Shin oak names are a tangle, and the two records do not use the same label. It is not alone. An iNaturalist observer walking the creek in 2016 noted several large shin oaks along it, so the champion is the biggest of a group rather than the only one. Nobody has recorded its age, and nothing we hold gives a basis to estimate one. If you know when this tree took root, tell us.