The branches are too heavy for the tree now, so they rest on wooden crutches.
Southern Live Oak
Quercus virginiana
Southern live oak is the evergreen oak of the humid coastal South, hung with Spanish moss and rarely far from salt air, and its old ones spread wider than they grow tall. We map 31 of them, in 13 cities.
The Middleton Oak in Charleston, put at 900 to 1,000 years, was long described as the largest tree in the eastern United States. Brunswick built Albany Street around Lover's Oak rather than through it. In New Orleans the McDonogh Oak rests its heavy branches on wooden crutches, and the Live Oak Society, whose members are the trees themselves, lists the Middleton Oak as its First Vice President. The Emancipation Proclamation got its first public reading in the South under a live oak in Hampton, Virginia, in 1863. In Dealey Plaza the shots at President Kennedy passed through a live oak's canopy, and Pisa has grown one since 1829.
New Orleans
Victor Anseman was a florist who retired and then gave the last fifteen years of his life to a park.
Between 1834 and 1844 there were stretches when scarcely a day passed without a duel being fought under these trees.
Photo: Ken-ichi Ueda (CC BY)
Eleven metres round, eighteen tall, and a crown reaching close to fifty metres across, which means the limbs left the trunk, ran horizontally as far as they could, and then came back down to the gr...
Seven sets of wind chimes hang in this oak, the longest of them over four metres, and they are tuned so that the wind cannot play a wrong note.
The name is the reason most people come and it is worth stating plainly: sixteen men took their own lives under this tree over about twelve years, from the 1890s into the 1900s, when this corner of...
Martha Washington had a husband and a rival, and both were oaks.
Every December this oak wears blue.
Houston
Most restaurants buy land for the parking.
The most famous thing about this oak is a story nobody can document.
Herman Strack landed at Galveston in 1848, a blacksmith out of Prussia and the first of five brothers to settle north Harris County.
Houston is younger than this tree, probably by the better part of a century.
The puzzle of this oak is where it stands: in a narrow walkway between graves, halfway up a slope at the back of Glenwood Cemetery.
The crown is the thing.
Sydney
On New Year's Day 1941 a storm split what was reported to be the largest tree in Australia into two pieces.
Photo: Meganesia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Valencia
This oak keeps its leaves through winter, and its timber was once worth more to a navy than to a carpenter.
Brunswick, Georgia
Brunswick built its street around this oak instead of through it.
Photo: Jud McCranie (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Hampton, Virginia
The Emancipation Proclamation got its first public reading in the South under this live oak, in September 1863, to the Black community of the Virginia Peninsula gathered in its shade.
Photo: Erik Soderstrom (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Charleston
Until 2012 this oak was described as the largest tree in the eastern United States.
The souvenirs say 1,500 years.
Nobody has published an age for a single tree in this yard, and the honest reason is that they are not all the same age.
Dallas
The shots fired at President Kennedy on 22 November 1963 passed through this canopy.
The grassy knoll is a slope with oaks on it, which is the part the photographs never quite show.
In 1998 the city and the corporation across the street proposed removing 21 mature live oaks from this plaza, by most accounts to move a roost of grackles along with them.
Gonzales, Texas
On the night of 13 March 1836, Sam Houston and as many as four hundred Texans camped under this live oak with Gonzales burning behind them.
Las Vegas
Nevada's champion live oak is a campus shade tree.
Pisa
A live oak from the American South has been growing in Pisa since 1829.
San Antonio
The most photographed tree at the Alamo arrived on a mule cart.
Photo: olekinderhook (CC BY 3.0)
Savannah
The first conservation easement granted to a single tree in the United States went to an oak that cars were parking on.
Photo: MrsHoldridge (CC BY 4.0)
The Candler Oak downtown is about 5.2 metres round.
The most photographed thing at Wormsloe is the youngest thing at Wormsloe.
Explore by city: New Orleans · Houston · Sydney · Valencia · Charleston · Dallas · Las Vegas · San Antonio · every city · or browse all species.