This is the biggest hackberry the Forest Preserves of Cook County have on their land, ranked first in their champion tree register.
Common Hackberry
Celtis occidentalis
The common hackberry is a tough tree of the American interior, warty-barked and planted for shade, rarely famous, which makes the ones that got noticed worth the walk. We map 5 of them, in 4 cities.
In the Forest Preserves of Cook County outside Chicago, the register's champion at Thatcher Woods stands 36.6 metres tall on a trunk 3.51 metres round, and the one at National Grove matches that girth to the centimetre. Utah's champion, at the corner of Washington Square in Salt Lake City, is wider than it is tall. In Minneapolis, students have been throwing tied pairs of shoes into one under the Washington Avenue Bridge since at least 1995. And in Padua, Italy put a middling hackberry on its national register for its shape: it leans, throwing its limbs out sideways and low over the grass of Parco Treves. Nobody has dated any of them.
Chicago
Of the three hackberries at the top of the Forest Preserves of Cook County's champion register, this one has the widest crown: about 23.5 metres one way and 21.6 the other, measured in December 2023.
Padua
This tree is on Italy's national register for being the wrong shape.
Minneapolis
Nobody agrees on why the shoes go up.
Salt Lake City
Utah's champion hackberry is wider than it is tall.
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