Ancient Trees in City Park

The Old Grove runs between City Park Avenue and the lagoon that was once Bayou Metairie, and the bayou is the reason the trees are there: centuries of it overflowing dropped silt and lifted that ground about a metre above the rest of the park. When the levees failed in 2005 and most of City Park went under water, the Old Grove stayed dry. The Old-Growth Forest Network added it in 2018 as the first site in Louisiana. The McDonogh Oak is the biggest of them, a trunk over eight metres round under a crown held up on wooden crutches, and the Anseman Oak a few hundred metres west is given the same seven-to-nine-hundred-year range by some accounts and more by others. The Dueling Oak is the survivor of a pair that men shot at each other under, and the Suicide Oak out on Victory Avenue carries the darkest name in the park for reasons the page explains. A century old rather than nine, and worth the walk anyway: an oak on the east side of Big Lake with seven sets of wind chimes hanging in it, tuned to a pentatonic scale so the wind cannot play a wrong note. And inside the Botanical Garden, the Enrique Alferez Oak grew the most of any tree on the park's own historic tour between 1983 and 1999, and is draped in blue lights every December for Celebration in the Oaks. The park itself is free and open daily; the Botanical Garden charges a small separate admission, and the walk from the museum to the Old Grove is about twenty minutes.