The Rockwood Oak

The tornado that tore through north Minneapolis in 2011 hit this bur oak and did not finish it. It is still standing, and it may well be the oldest living thing in the city. The Minneapolis Parks Foundation puts it at 315 years; Mpls.St.Paul Magazine says approximately 300. Both of them call it a candidate for the city's oldest tree, which is a claim nobody has been able to settle. Bur oak is the species that makes that plausible. It is the oak of the prairie edge, with bark thick enough to survive the fires that used to run through the oak savanna every few years, which is why Minnesota's true veterans are bur oaks rather than something more delicate. This one carries burls, the lumpy carbuncle-like growths that show on a trunk with a long history behind it. It had been growing for a century before Fort Snelling went up at the river junction downstream, and the city came later still. It is named for C.J. Rockwood, who helped expand the park around it; Theodore Wirth Regional Park grew up around the tree rather than the other way round. Finding it takes patience. It sits in thick woods on the western shore of Wirth Lake, near the southern end of the park, and the trail goes past without announcing it. Nobody has published a girth figure, which is an odd gap for a tree with this claim on it.