The Enrique Alferez Oak
Approximate location.
You need a ticket to see this treePaid entry: inside the New Orleans Botanical Garden, which charges a small admission fee separate from the rest of City Park.
Every December this oak wears blue. Draped in dripping LED lights for Celebration in the Oaks, City Park's holiday lighting event, it is one of the more theatrical trees on a list that runs mostly to war and duels. It carries the name of Enrique Alferez, the sculptor whose WPA-era fountains and figures are scattered through City Park, though the tree itself stands in the Botanical Garden rather than at the newer sculpture garden that also bears his name. It is one of 26 oaks the park singled out for a historic walking tour, drawn from roughly 250 Live Oak Society members growing across the grounds, and when the park re-measured its tour trees between 1983 and 1999, this was the one that had grown the most. Its trunk measured just over 16 feet round in 1983; the Live Oak Society's current figure puts it at over 17. Nobody has published its age, which for a tree in a park this thoroughly documented is itself a small honest gap. What is on record is upkeep: City Park describes it as getting regular watering and feeding at that spot, the kind of attention that keeps a showpiece a showpiece.
New Orleans Botanical Garden, City Park, 5 Victory Avenue You can recognise it, in December, by the blue LED lights draped through its crown for Celebration in the Oaks. It stands in the New Orleans Botanical Garden, City Park.
City Park, Mid-City, about 6 km north of the French Quarter. Canal Streetcar to City Park / Museum, then a walk to the Botanical Garden entrance on Victory Avenue.
