The Shiny Xylosma of Winchester Park

Nevada's champion xylosma is a hedge nobody cut. Xylosma congestum is sold all over the Southwest as a clipped evergreen screen, kept at chest height along car parks and front walls for decades at a time. Left alone it becomes a small tree, and the largest one on record in this state is 24 feet tall on a 55-inch trunk, in Winchester Park. That is the quiet appeal of a big-tree register. Champions are recorded species by species, so the list ends up documenting what ordinary landscaping plants do when somebody forgets to prune them. A 24-foot xylosma is a stranger sight than a 70-foot eucalyptus, and there is one of each in this park. The caveats are the same as for its two neighbours. The measurements are the register's 2015 figures, the most recent independent reference we found is a 2016 article naming three champions here without listing their species, and a windstorm in July 2025 took down mature trees across the Las Vegas valley. Nobody has told us this one is gone. Nobody has confirmed it is standing either. No age is recorded for it. The pin is the park rather than the tree, shared with the other two. If you go out and find it, or find a gap where it was, tell us and the page changes that day.