The Champion Mexican Sycamore

This is the biggest Mexican sycamore in Texas and it is about forty years old. The city forester puts its planting in the mid 1980s, which rules out any romance about ancient wood; what it has instead is speed. Mexican sycamore can put on several feet a year, and this one had reached 328 centimetres of girth by the time the Texas Big Tree Registry taped it in November 2021, taking the state championship for the species and scoring the registry's top grade for condition. The bark is the reason to walk over. It sheds in irregular plates, leaving a mottled camouflage pattern that gives way to a trunk close to bone white, which is why people on the Trinity University campus call it the ghost tree. The leaves are large, felted silver underneath, and they flip in wind. A second, slightly smaller Mexican sycamore grows beside it, both of them fed by the drainage creek that runs through the disc golf course. So it earns its place on size and strangeness rather than on years, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than dressing a young tree up as an old one. The ground is open campus, no gate and no fee, about 4.5 kilometres north of downtown, with a VIA Route 8 stop on Stadium Drive. Our pin marks the course rather than the trunk. Look for the whitest tree on it.