The Jujube of the Botanic Garden

The largest jujube on record in Texas is a Chinese fruit tree, and it stands about five metres off a road in Fort Worth. The Botanic Garden's champion runs to roughly 13.7 metres tall, which is a lot of height for a species usually kept as a squat orchard tree with the fruit inside a ladder's reach. Its trunk is 190 centimetres round. The Texas Big Tree Registry took that measurement in May 2020, and the regional tree trail that maps the garden's champions calls it the biggest of its kind recorded in the state. Jujube has been grown in Chinese orchards for thousands of years and came to America as a crop rather than as an ornament. The fruit ripens green to a wrinkled red brown and eats like a dry apple, sweeter as it shrivels. Most people walking the corner of Old Garden Road and Rock Springs Road go past it without registering that they are looking at a state record, because it does not look like one: no buttressed trunk, no fence, no plaque doing the work for it. Nobody has dated this tree and no source we can find has tried, so if you know when it went in, tell us. The garden charges 14 dollars for adults, which covers the whole grounds, and the champion trail passes several other record holders on the way round.