The Shumard Oak of Linda Hall Library

The largest Shumard oak in greater Kansas City grows on a library lawn, and the library knows it by number. It is 34-21-1 in the Linda Hall Library arboretum's own catalogue, one of the sixteen trees the Champion Tree Program of Greater Kansas City records as the biggest of their kind in the metro. That programme has been keeping score since 1955, when the J.C. Nichols Company's landscaping department started measuring the city's trees. This one is not old. It went into the ground in 1968 as nursery stock from Rosehill, which makes it a contemporary of the Apollo programme rather than of anything medieval. What it has instead is speed. Shumard oak is a bottomland tree of the southern and central states, built for deep soil and steady water, and on a watered institutional lawn it behaves accordingly. At the 2008 survey the trunk measured 83 inches round, 211 centimetres, under a crown 61 feet tall and 45 feet across. No newer figure has been published, and close to two decades of growth have gone onto the trunk since. Everything on record here comes from the library's own arboretum files. No outside surveyor has put a tape around it, so treat the numbers as the institution's rather than as a second opinion. The grounds are free and open dawn to dusk, and the oak stands on them as a catalogued specimen rather than as landscaping.