The Wormsloe Oak Avenue

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.