The Candler Oak

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.