Boise's most remarkable trees are state and city champions rather than legends: the largest bur oak, the largest Kentucky coffeetree and the largest giant sequoia recorded anywhere in Idaho, the last of which travelled a quarter mile through the city on a flatbed in 2017 so a hospital could expand without cutting it down. A sapling grown from the Amsterdam tree Anne Frank could see from her window completes the four, planted at a memorial downtown after two years in quarantine.
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The Idaho Champion Bur Oak of Julia Davis Park
Bur Oak (Quercus macrocarpa) · not documented · Julia Davis Park, central Boise
Idaho's biggest bur oak is a tree that does not grow wild anywhere near Idaho. The species belongs to the prairies and river bottoms of the American Midwest, a thousand miles east. This one stands in Julia Davis Park in central Boise, and the University of Idaho's Big Tree Program, which keeps the state's official champion list, puts it at the top for its kind.
The measurements are 169 inches around the trunk, 429 centimetres, 54 inches through, and 105 feet tall. The height is the part worth pausing on. Bur oak on open ground is a spreading, heavy-limbed tree that puts its effort sideways, and thirty-two metres is tall for one.
Nobody has dated it. Champion registers record size rather than age, and bur oaks grow slowly enough that a girth figure alone will not settle the question, so this page carries no number instead of a flattering one. If you know when it went in, tell us.
It was nominated for the state list in 2008 and measured for the register's January 2014 edition, the most recent published figure we could find. The park around it also holds Zoo Boise, the Boise Art Museum and the Idaho State Historical Museum, so most people crossing it are on their way somewhere, walking past the largest tree of its species in the state.
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The Moved Giant Sequoia of Fort Boise Park
Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · about 114 years (planted 1912) · East End, Boise
In June 2017 a hospital paid around $300,000 to move a tree a quarter of a mile. The tree was this giant sequoia, ten storeys of it by the local reckoning, lifted with its roots intact and walked through Boise on a Saturday night from the garden where it had stood since about 1912 to Fort Boise Park. St. Luke's Medical Center wanted a new tower on the old spot and did not want to be the people who cut the sequoia down.
It had been planted beside the home of Drs. Fred and Alice Pittenger. Family history holds that the seedling material came from California by way of the naturalist John Muir, which has been repeated for a century and rests on the family's own telling rather than on any document. Take it as the story the tree arrived with.
The University of Idaho's champion register measured it at its old address: 224 inches around, 569 centimetres, 70 inches through the trunk, 89 feet tall. It is the largest known giant sequoia in the state.
Moving a sequoia at a hundred years old is a gamble. The arborists on the job put its remaining span at another three to five centuries if the roots took hold. Nine years on it is standing in a public park where anybody can walk up to it, which was the entire point of the exercise.
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The Anne Frank Chestnut Sapling
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · roughly 11 to 15 years old · Near Boise State University / Boise River Greenbelt, downtown Boise
Anne Frank could see one tree from the annex, and this is its child. Chestnuts from that Amsterdam horse chestnut were raised into saplings, eleven of which were planted in the United States, one of them here. The parent, roughly 150 to 170 years old, came down in a storm in August 2010, so this graft has now outlived the tree it came from.
Nothing about its size or age argues for the trip. It reached Boise around October 2009 at about three feet tall and had to sit out roughly two years of quarantine in a city nursery before it could go in the ground. Nobody has published a firm planting date, so we date it loosely, somewhere between eleven and fifteen years old. If you know the year it went in, tell us.
The lineage is the whole case, and the company it keeps says what the distributors thought they were doing: the other American recipients include the White House, the 9/11 Memorial in New York and Central High School in Little Rock.
It grows on a grassy berm behind a low iron fence, ringed with pink roses, across from the plaza where a bronze Anne Frank stands at a window looking out. The memorial is free and open dawn to dusk, every day of the year.
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The Idaho Champion Kentucky Coffeetree of Julia Davis Park
Kentucky Coffeetree (Gymnocladus dioica) · not documented · Julia Davis Park, central Boise
The largest Kentucky coffeetree in Idaho grows in a city park that also holds an art museum and a zoo. It stands 74 feet tall with a trunk 328 centimetres round, and it has held the state record since a University of Idaho forester nominated it in 1986.
It is an odd thing to be champion of. The species belongs to the Midwest rather than to the high desert, and its name is literal: settlers roasted the seeds as a substitute for coffee. Raw, the seeds and pods are mildly toxic, which is why the seedless cultivars are the ones cities plant today. The register does not record which kind this one is.
Everything we know about it comes from one place. The Idaho Big Tree Program printed identical figures in its 2014 and 2019 editions, five years apart: 41 inches through the trunk at chest height, 74 feet tall, 215 points. That is one register republished rather than two sources agreeing, so the entry is flagged. What the repetition does tell us is that nobody struck the tree off in between.
Nobody has dated it. The register gives no age for any of its cultivated trees, so the field stays empty rather than filled with a guess. If you know when it went in, tell us. It shares Julia Davis Park with the champion bur oak, which makes the two an easy pair in one walk.
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