The Red Oak of the Thain Family Forest

This oak grows in the middle of the Spicebush Trail inside the Thain Family Forest, a 50 acre stretch of the New York Botanical Garden that has never been logged and represents the largest surviving remnant of the woodland that once covered most of New York City before European colonization. The Botanical Garden was deliberately sited here in 1895 specifically because this forest already existed, a decision that preserved a functioning fragment of pre-colonial Lenapehoking rather than planting a garden from scratch. At a trunk diameter over five feet, this red oak, designated a Great Tree in 2024, ranks among the largest and most accessible specimens in a forest that also holds tulip trees, sweetgums, hemlocks and beeches estimated at up to 300 years old in less visited sections. Red oaks support more moth and butterfly species as larval hosts than almost any other tree genus in the northeastern United States, more than 400 by some counts, making this single oak a small ecosystem of its own even before accounting for its age or size.