The Spring Creek Winged Elm

This is the largest winged elm recorded in Texas, and it is not a large tree. The trunk is 279 centimetres round, which for the species is remarkable and for this page is modest. Champion status is scored on trunk, height and crown added together, and where this tree wins is height: thirty metres, which is tall for an elm that usually tops out well short of that, with a twenty four metre crown above it. Winged elm gets its name from the corky ridges that run down either side of the younger twigs, wide enough to look deliberate. On a tree this old you will find them out at the ends of the branches rather than on the trunk, so it is worth picking up a fallen twig. It stands on the Spring Creek Greenway, a long ribbon of bottomland forest that Harris County has been stitching together along the creek for years, and which is one of the largest urban forested corridors in the country. The Forest Service measured the tree in December 2025. No age is recorded. Winged elm is not a long-lived species, so this one is old for its kind rather than old in the way an oak is old.