The Old Pecan Tree

There is a footpath in Sugar Land called Old Pecan Tree Trail, and it is named after exactly what you would hope. The tree is a pecan of 467 centimetres round and twenty eight metres tall, with a crown spreading twenty five metres, measured by the Texas A&M Forest Service in March 2026. Trail guides rank it among the twenty five largest trees in Texas, which is scored on trunk, height and crown together. Pecan is the state tree, and it is one of the few state trees anywhere chosen for something other than looks: it feeds people. A tree this size drops a serious crop, and in a good year the ground beneath it is worth walking slowly across in October. The trail is short, well under a kilometre, and the tree is the reason it exists. That is the useful thing about a path named for a tree: nobody has to explain where to go. No age has been recorded. Pecans of this girth in the Brazos bottomlands are generally reckoned in centuries rather than decades, but nobody has counted the rings and this page is not going to guess.