The Heritage Oak of Grant Hall

Nevada's champion live oak is a campus shade tree. Quercus virginiana belongs to the humid American South, the wide dark thing you see hung with Spanish moss; this one grows in the Mojave, on the Academic Mall at UNLV, and the Nevada Big Tree Register makes it the largest of its kind recorded in the state. It is a Heritage oak, a cross bred for the height of one oak and the width of another, and the university's own arborists describe it in exactly those terms. The register measured it in 2015 at 46 inches around, 56 feet tall and 41 feet across. UNLV put it at roughly 60 feet in November 2025, which is a decade of growth rather than a disagreement between sources. None of that makes it old, and this page does not pretend otherwise. Nobody has published a planting date, and girth alone will not date a hybrid for which no growth rate exists. If you know when it went in, tell us. What it is instead is the front door of an accidental arboretum. A university in a desert planted a collection, watered it, and now holds state records for species from four continents, most of them within a fifteen minute walk of this oak. The pin marks Grant Hall rather than the trunk, because neither source gives coordinates. Walk to the building and look for the widest crown on the mall.