The Tree of Life

Eleven metres round, eighteen tall, and a crown reaching close to fifty metres across, which means the limbs left the trunk, ran horizontally as far as they could, and then came back down to the grass. That is why this is the most climbed and most photographed tree in Louisiana: it invites you up without asking you to be able to climb. The sign by it gives a planting date of around 1740. A better story says Etienne de Bore, the first mayor of New Orleans and the man who worked out how to granulate sugar commercially, planted it in 1771 as a wedding present for his wife. That version is tradition rather than record, and it has the wrong decade, but it has stuck hard enough that the tree carries his name as often as its other one. In 1934 it became one of the forty three founding members of the Live Oak Society, an organisation whose members are all trees and whose only human is a secretary who keeps the roll. It stands outside the zoo fence, so you do not need a ticket. The giraffes are on the other side.