This swamp white oak is very nearly as wide as it is tall: a crown about 21 metres across in both directions, on a tree 21.9 metres high.
Swamp White Oak
Quercus bicolor
The swamp white oak is rare in Canada, where its population is a tiny fraction of the bur oak's, and we map three of them: one on a battlefield, one in a forest preserve and one in a city where nobody thought the species grew wild. We map 3 of them, in 3 cities.
On the afternoon of 2 July 1863, General Daniel Sickles gathered his officers in the shade of the oak at the Trostle Farm in Gettysburg before pushing his corps to the Peach Orchard. The artist Charles Reed sketched the tree that day, and at roughly 175 to 220 years it is still alive. In Spears Woods outside Chicago, Cook County's second-ranked swamp white oak stands 21.9 metres tall under a crown about as wide. And in Ottawa's Dominion Arboretum, the species was not believed native to the region until a few very mature trees turned up near the city.
Chicago
Gettysburg
On the afternoon of 2 July 1863, Major General Daniel Sickles gathered his officers under this oak to confer before he moved.
Ottawa
Nobody thought this species grew here.
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