The Corbett Oak

Portland's heritage tree law exists because a group of neighbours once stood between this oak and a chainsaw. A developer wanted the corner lot for row houses. The neighbours wrapped the trunk in chicken wire and tire chains, and when a crew arrived and began cutting a ring through the bark to kill the tree where it stood, they stopped the work partway round. The horizontal scar from that attempt is still on the trunk. The fight, led by Phyllis Reynolds and a group calling itself Friends of the Oak, is credited with pushing the city's Urban Forestry Commission to create the Heritage Tree program in 1993, the ordinance that now protects every tree on this page. The oak itself was designated in 1998. Saving a tree is not the same as saving the ground under it, so the neighbours kept raising money, and after a ten-year campaign the lot was bought outright. It is now Heritage Tree Park, a small city-owned corner named for the tree it was bought to protect. The Oregon Encyclopedia puts the oak at roughly 300 years old, which would make it more than a century old when Portland was founded in the 1840s. The city's register measures it at 28 metres tall, 24 metres across the crown and just under five metres round. Oregon white oak is a slow grower, and a trunk that size is not something a developer's lot produces twice.