A live oak in a Fort Worth cemetery shades the graves of First World War airmen from the Royal Flying Corps. It stands over a group of Commonwealth War Graves in Greenwood Memorial Park, the resting place of pilots killed in training exercises in Tarrant County during the war. They were trained fast and for dangerous work: taking aerial photographs of German positions and shooting down observation balloons, on as little as fifteen hours in biplanes. More than 1,500 pilots earned their wings in Fort Worth. The men under this tree died here, in training, thousands of kilometres from the war they were preparing for. The same cemetery holds the Turner Oak, the oldest dated tree in the city, about 300 metres away by the main entrance. This one has no plaque about buried gold and no recorded age; the city's heritage register lists it for what it stands over rather than for its size, and gives no measurements. We also have no recent sighting of it beyond that register. If you visit, tell us it is still there and roughly how big it is.
Commonwealth War Graves plot, Greenwood Memorial Park, Fort Worth, TXYou can recognise it as the live oak standing over the small group of Commonwealth War Graves. It stands in Greenwood Memorial Park, about 300 metres northeast of the Turner Oak at the entrance.
Free. In Greenwood Memorial Park cemetery (the city register calls it Greenwood Cemetery), open to visitors in daylight.
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