The Martha Washington Oak
Approximate location.
You need a ticket to see this treePaid entry: inside Audubon Zoo, which charges zoo admission. Stands in the rhino habitat, viewable from the public path around the enclosure.
Martha Washington had a husband and a rival, and both were oaks. In 1934, when the Louisiana Garden Club Federation founded the Live Oak Society and inducted its first 43 members, three trees on the old de Bore sugarcane plantation joined together: George Washington, Martha Washington, and the tree now known as the Tree of Life, already published on this page as the Etienne de Bore Oak. George and Martha stood on either side of the plantation house, framing the view of it the way a married couple frames a photograph. George is gone now, marked deceased in the Society's own register. Martha is not, and today stands inside the zoo that grew up around the old plantation ground, in the rhino habitat. To join the Society in 1934 a tree needed a trunk at least eight feet round, so Martha was already a substantial tree nine decades ago. The Society's own measurement puts her at 28 feet round today, a couple of feet more than the figure recorded when George Douglass first registered her. Nobody has published an age, and a live oak this size does not hurry toward one. She keeps her Society rank too: current fourth vice president, an honour the Live Oak Society hands out to its most senior members rather than to anyone with a vote.
Audubon Zoo, rhino habitat, Audubon Park (near the giraffe habitat area where the Tree of Life stands) You can recognise it by the massive trunk, 28 feet round, standing over the rhino enclosure. It is inside Audubon Zoo, near the already-published Tree of Life.
Audubon Park, Uptown New Orleans, about 9 km from the French Quarter. St Charles streetcar to Audubon Park, then walk into the zoo.
