Tulip Poplar at Morven Park

Ninety-seven feet is about the height of a nine-storey building, and that is how tall the Loudoun County Big Tree Registry measured this tulip tree near the mansion at Morven Park in 2025. In metres, 29.6. Its trunk is 154 inches round, about 3.9 metres, and its crown spreads 68 feet, for a total of 268 points. Morven Park is a thousand-acre estate on the north-western edge of Leesburg, once the home of Westmoreland Davis, the Virginia governor who bought it in 1903. His wife Marguerite laid out the formal boxwood gardens in 1930. Mansion tours are ticketed, but the grounds are free to walk every day from seven in the morning until six in the evening. What the paperwork does not tell us is how old the tree is. The Davises' arrival in 1903 and the 1930 gardens date the estate's later history, not this trunk, and no source we have seen gives a planting date or an age. A tulip tree this size could predate both, or not. Nobody knows. If you do, tell us. The county's pin places the tree in the mansion area, but on an estate this size it is approximate, so look for a big tulip tree near the house rather than trusting the dot to the metre. Tulip trees are easy to tell apart from the rest by their square-ended leaves, shaped like the outline of a tulip.