The Treaty Oak

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.