Two live oaks, and both of them changed what a tree could be here. The Candler Oak, on Drayton Street beside Forsyth Park, was the first single tree in the United States to be given a conservation easement, at a point when cars were parking over its roots. The Wormsloe avenue, fifteen minutes southeast on the Isle of Hope, is four hundred oaks along a mile and a half of dirt road, and it is a good deal younger than the estate it leads to.
0 of 2 visited in Savannah
1
The Candler Oak
Southern Live Oak (Quercus virginiana) · roughly 300 to 450 years (estimates vary) · Historic District, beside Forsyth Park
The first conservation easement granted to a single tree in the United States went to an oak that cars were parking on. Asphalt from the hospital lot next door ran right up around the trunk, vehicles stood over the root plate, and arborists gave the tree about twenty years. The Savannah Tree Foundation lifted the asphalt, pruned it, fenced off the root zone and has looked after it since. Forty five years on it reports the tree thriving.
The paperwork is oddly slippery for something this well known. One account dates the easement to 1984, the Foundation's own page says 1985, and its size appears as 6,804 linear feet in one source and 6,804 square feet in the other. Same number, different units, nobody has reconciled it.
The age is softer still. Estimates run from over 300 years to 450 and none of them comes from a core sample; they are figures repeated rather than derived, and live oak ages are habitually overstated. What was measured is the trunk, 17 feet round, and the height, about 16 and a half metres.
It has stood through the site's whole run of owners: Candler Hospital, then a law school that added cameras and a fence of its own before it closed, and now SCAD. You look at it from the Drayton Street sidewalk, which is what the fence is for.
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2
The Wormsloe Oak Avenue
Southern Live Oak (Quercus virginiana) · roughly 130 years (the avenue itself, not the estate) · Isle of Hope
The most photographed thing at Wormsloe is the youngest thing at Wormsloe. Noble Jones took this land in the 1730s alongside Oglethorpe, and the tabby ruin at the far end of the site is the oldest standing structure in the Savannah area. The avenue has nothing to do with that. Two independent sources put its planting in the 1890s, by Wymberley Jones De Renne, a descendant, and one of them says it marked the birth of a sixth-generation Jones. That makes the oaks about 130 years old, which is young for a live oak and long enough for the crowns to have closed overhead completely.
More than four hundred of them line a mile and a half of dirt road. Planted in two ranks and planted close, so the drive works as a tunnel: the branches meet, the Spanish moss hangs down into the gap, and the light arrives already green. It is the single image most people carry of coastal Georgia, and it was made deliberately, by a Victorian with a plan and a nursery order.
Entry is through the visitor centre and is paid, this being a Georgia state historic site. The avenue starts at the gate, and nothing obliges you to drive it. Walking is the better way to see how carefully it was set out.
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