Lover's Oak

Brunswick built its street around this oak instead of through it. Lover's Oak stands in the middle of Albany Street just south of Prince Street, ten main limbs branching low off one trunk, with the asphalt splitting and rejoining on either side of it. The city and Wikipedia both date it to the twelfth century, about nine hundred years, with no ring count or growth rate behind the number, so read that as the figure Brunswick has always used rather than anything measured. The trunk is cited at thirteen feet through, which is large enough for a live oak to be worth doubting; heavy buttressing at the base flatters a tape. What is not in doubt is what standing in a road costs. In 2015 a semi-truck hit the tree and tore off one of the ten limbs. It recovered, and traffic still goes around it. Southern live oaks are evergreen, swapping old leaves for new in spring without ever going bare, so there is no month to wait for and nothing to miss. It stands free and unfenced in the Old Town historic district, reachable at any hour, two blocks from the middle of downtown. The reason to walk those two blocks is not that it is the oldest thing in coastal Georgia. It is that a town rerouted itself around one tree and has never got round to changing its mind.