The Rienzi Yaupon

Texas keeps a champion register for its biggest trees, and this entry is a plant most of the South clips into a hedge. Yaupon holly usually grows as a dense evergreen shrub. The one in the gardens at Rienzi has gone up like a tree: just over nine metres tall, a crown spreading nearly as wide, and a trunk 91 centimetres round, which is enough for state champion class on the Texas A&M Forest Service's registry. Foresters taped it in August 2024, which makes it one of the freshest measurements on this map. The four acres it grows in belong to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The Houston Chronicle's Azalea Trail coverage describes the garden's yaupons as part of its evergreen structure, the quiet green that holds the place together while everything else takes its turn flowering. Walking the garden costs nothing and needs no reservation, though the whole property shuts for the month of August. Two things we cannot tell you. Only the state registry names this particular plant, so it sits flagged here until a second source catches up with it. And nobody has dated it: yaupon gets measured for girth far more often than for years, and no growth rate we would trust for the species turned up. If you know how long it has been standing there, tell us.