Minneapolis hides its oldest tree in plain thick woods and puts its oddest one under a bridge. The Rockwood Oak, a bur oak pushing 300 years and a likely candidate for the city's oldest living thing, took a direct hit from the 2011 tornado and is still standing at Theodore Wirth Park. Nearby, students have spent three decades throwing shoes into a plain hackberry for no agreed reason. Add the state's champion basswood and an endangered hemlock planted by a garden's own founder, and four unfamous trees make the case.
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1
The Rockwood Oak
Bur Oak (Quercus macrocarpa) · roughly 300 years · Theodore Wirth Park
The tornado that tore through north Minneapolis in 2011 hit this bur oak and did not finish it. It is still standing, and it may well be the oldest living thing in the city. The Minneapolis Parks Foundation puts it at 315 years; Mpls.St.Paul Magazine says approximately 300. Both of them call it a candidate for the city's oldest tree, which is a claim nobody has been able to settle.
Bur oak is the species that makes that plausible. It is the oak of the prairie edge, with bark thick enough to survive the fires that used to run through the oak savanna every few years, which is why Minnesota's true veterans are bur oaks rather than something more delicate. This one carries burls, the lumpy carbuncle-like growths that show on a trunk with a long history behind it.
It had been growing for a century before Fort Snelling went up at the river junction downstream, and the city came later still. It is named for C.J. Rockwood, who helped expand the park around it; Theodore Wirth Regional Park grew up around the tree rather than the other way round.
Finding it takes patience. It sits in thick woods on the western shore of Wirth Lake, near the southern end of the park, and the trail goes past without announcing it. Nobody has published a girth figure, which is an odd gap for a tree with this claim on it.
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2
The Shoe Tree
Common Hackberry (Celtis occidentalis) · not documented · West Bank / University of Minnesota
Nobody agrees on why the shoes go up. University of Minnesota students have been throwing tied-together pairs into the branches of this hackberry since at least 1995, when the Minnesota Daily first wrote about it, and the explanations on offer run from graduation ritual to end-of-exams release to no reason anyone can name. The shoes hang until weather or the park takes them down. More arrive.
It is a common hackberry, and that is the honest description: a plain North American tree with rough corky bark and no claim at all to age or size. Nobody has dated it and nobody has measured it. It is here because it is a landmark, which it unarguably is, with its own Wikipedia page and a University of Minnesota Libraries piece written about it, which is more attention than almost any other tree in this city gets.
It stands in Bohemian Flats Park on the west bank of the Mississippi, directly under the Washington Avenue Bridge, on ground where an immigrant settlement of Bohemian, Slovak and Scandinavian families lived down in the river flats until the city cleared them out. The park kept their name.
Go near the end of a semester if you want to catch the tradition in motion. The rest of the year it is a hackberry wearing what other people left behind.
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3
The Windom Park Basswood
American Basswood (Tilia americana) · not documented · Northeast Minneapolis
The largest American basswood recorded in Minnesota is standing in an ordinary neighbourhood park in Northeast Minneapolis, hanging out over a slope behind the park building, with nothing there to tell you so. The Minneapolis Parks Foundation and Mpls.St.Paul Magazine both name it the state champion of its species, and both note the Park Board's Heritage Tree designation. Neither prints a height or a circumference, which is a strange gap for a tree whose entire claim is size.
Basswood is the American lime, and for a fortnight around the turn of June into July it does something an oak never will. The flowers are small, pale and hanging, the scent carries the width of a park, and bees work a tree this size hard enough that you hear it before you reach it. Beekeepers here set their year by the basswood flow.
The rest of the year it is a broad, heart-leaved shade tree, which is what basswoods were planted for along American streets by the thousand.
Nobody has dated it, and champion status is about size rather than years: basswood grows quickly, so a big one need not be an old one. You will find it southwest of the park building on NE Hayes Street, leaning out over the hillside. If anyone has the measurements, we would like them.
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4
The Eloise Butler Hemlock
Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) · roughly 110 to 115 years · Theodore Wirth Park
Minnesota has perhaps fifty mature eastern hemlocks left, and the largest one in Minneapolis was put in the ground by hand. Eloise Butler planted hemlocks in this grove in September 1911, then 28 more on 28 May 1914. The wildflower garden that carries her name grew up around them.
The species is Endangered in Minnesota, raised from Special Concern in 2013. This is the far western edge of a range that properly belongs to the Appalachians and the Great Lakes forests, and the garden's own historians describe this stand as probably the oldest southernmost one left in the state.
This is the biggest tree in it, on the Minneapolis Heritage Tree List for champion size and named a state co-champion for its species. The figures depend on who held the tape: 75 feet tall and 87 inches round by one account, 80 feet and 84 inches by the garden's own. Either reading describes a hemlock of a size Minnesota does not grow any more.
Its age is reasoning rather than record. Nobody wrote down which planting produced this particular tree, but hemlock is slow, and a trunk this thick cannot be one of the saplings added in 1989. That leaves 1911 or 1914, and an age somewhere around 110 to 115 years.
The garden is free and gated. It opens mid-April to mid-October and closes on Mondays, so this is not a tree you can visit in the snow.
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