In March 2023 Pittsburgh's Shade Tree Commission drew up its first official list of Remarkable Trees, chosen from 44 resident nominations. Three of the winners stand together in Mellon Park, the city's first public arboretum: a champion bald cypress, a katsura that smells of caramel every October, and a lacebark pine grown for its peeling bark. A fourth, a white oak, was named for what it feeds rather than how big it is.
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The Pittsburgh Champion Bald Cypress of Mellon Park
Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) · not documented · Shadyside/Point Breeze, Pittsburgh
Bald cypress is a swamp tree. It evolved in the flooded bottomlands of the American South, where it pushes woody knees up out of standing water, and it has no obvious business being the champion of anything in Pittsburgh. In March 2023 the city's Shade Tree Commission named this one exactly that: the largest bald cypress on public ground anywhere in the city.
The title came out of an open call. The Remarkable Trees of Pittsburgh program, run by the Shade Tree Commission with Tree Pittsburgh, took 44 nominations from residents; 15 of them met the criteria, and the city's first list of remarkable trees was drawn from those. Three stand in Mellon Park, which was Pittsburgh's first public arboretum, and this is one of the three.
November is when it does the thing that catches people out. It is a conifer and it is deciduous, which most trees have the decency not to be at the same time. The fine needles turn a foxy rust, come down over a couple of weeks, and leave a bare fluted trunk standing through the winter with nothing on it at all.
No age, height or girth has been published for it. The city established that it is the biggest of its kind here and never wrote down by how much. If you know the numbers, send them.
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The Katsura of Mellon Park
Katsura (Cercidiphyllum japonicum) · not documented · Shadyside/Point Breeze, Pittsburgh
In autumn, a katsura smells of burnt sugar. As the leaves yellow and fall they release maltol, the compound behind the smell of caramel and candy floss, and for a couple of weeks the ground under the tree smells sweet enough that people stop walking and look around for a bakery.
That is the sort of thing Pittsburgh's Shade Tree Commission had in mind when it put this one on the city's first list of Remarkable Trees in March 2023, under the heading Tree of a Kind: not the biggest of its species, but unusual in form, origin or appearance. The list came from 44 nominations sent in by residents, of which 15 met the criteria. Three of those stand in Mellon Park, the city's first public arboretum, and this katsura is a short walk from the champion bald cypress at the Fifth Avenue and Beechwood Boulevard corner.
Cercidiphyllum japonicum is Japanese, and it grows nothing like the oaks and maples around it. The leaves are small blue-green hearts set in opposite pairs, and the branches layer outward rather than climbing, so the whole tree reads as horizontal. In October the leaves go apricot and pale gold before they drop.
No age, height or girth is on public record for it, which is true of all three Mellon Park trees on the city's list. Go in October and let your nose find it before your eyes do.
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The Lacebark Pine of Mellon Park
Lacebark Pine (Pinus bungeana) · not documented · Shadyside/Point Breeze, Pittsburgh
Most pines wear dark, furrowed, forgettable bark. This one peels. A lacebark pine sheds its outer bark in irregular plates, the way a plane tree does, and leaves behind a patchwork of olive, grey-green and chalk white that grows paler with age until an old trunk is close to ivory. The bark is the entire reason anybody planted it, and the reason its English name says nothing about pines.
Pittsburgh's Shade Tree Commission named it a Tree of a Kind in March 2023, one of the categories in the city's first Remarkable Trees list. That list came out of 44 nominations from residents, 15 of which met the criteria, and it is a deliberately different kind of honour from a champion title: nobody nominates a lacebark pine because it is large. Pinus bungeana is Chinese, often multi-stemmed, and slow, and it was recorded here for what it looks like rather than what it measures.
It stands on the north side of Mellon Park, towards Penn Avenue, across Fifth Avenue from the champion bald cypress and the katsura that were listed alongside it in the same round.
No age, height or girth has been published. What can be said is that this is one of the few trees in the park worth a February visit: the bark is the show, it runs all twelve months, and it has nothing competing with it in winter.
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The Giving Tree White Oak of Phillips Park
White Oak (Quercus alba) · not documented · Beechview, Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh has a category of remarkable tree called the Giving Tree, awarded for what a tree does for everything else living around it rather than for how big it is. When the city's Shade Tree Commission drew up its first list in March 2023, this white oak in Phillips Park took that title.
It is a defensible choice. An oak is the most productive thing most American parks contain: acorns that feed deer, squirrels, jays and woodpeckers through the winter, and caterpillars in numbers no other native tree comes close to, which is what songbirds actually put in front of their chicks. A single mature Quercus alba is less a tree than a food supply with bark on it, and white oaks do this for centuries.
Be aware of how thin the record is. Only one document names this tree, the commission's own minutes from 16 March 2023, and the program's public write-ups sit on a site we could not read. There is no published age, no height, no girth, and no second account. Phillips Park is free and open, in Beechview, and the pin will get you into the park rather than to the trunk.
So this is the entry that most needs a reader. If you live in Beechview, or you have stood under this oak, tell us which one it is and what it measures.
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