The Bur Oak Grove of Wooded Island

One of these oaks blew down around 2016, and its rings were counted back to roughly 1730. It had been standing for nearly three centuries when it fell. The ones still up are of the same generation: DNAinfo reported 250 year old bur oaks across the island, with a red oak of about 150 among them. Wooded Island is the part of the 1893 World's Fair that was deliberately left alone. Frederick Law Olmsted kept buildings off it entirely while the Court of Honor went up in white plaster to the south, and fair era painters kept turning their backs on the architecture to paint these oaks instead. The island sits on an undisturbed sand ridge, which is why the soil under the trees was never scraped and rebuilt the way the rest of Jackson Park was. In 2016 the Army Corps of Engineers spent 8.1 million dollars restoring the habitat here and wrote the old bur oaks into the plan, along with roughly 120 bur oak saplings that had seeded themselves around their parents. An oak stand actually reproducing inside a city is a rare thing to stand in. The place to stand is the path just south of the Osaka Garden, looking into the south end of the island, where the grove reads as one thing rather than as scattered trees.