In 1989 a man poured enough Velpar herbicide around the roots of this tree to kill roughly a hundred trees.
Photo: Larry D. Moore (CC BY 4.0)
Texas Live Oak
Quercus fusiformis
Texas Live Oak is the tougher inland cousin of the coastal live oak, built to survive Hill Country droughts and freezes that would kill its Gulf Coast relative. We map 11 of them, in 2 cities.
The old ones carry more history than botanical fame. Austin's Treaty Oak, reckoned at about 500 years old and known locally as the father of the forest, survived a 1989 poisoning that killed two thirds of it, then set acorns again eight years later. The Battle Oaks nearly fell in 1923 to make room for a university building, until a classics professor talked the committee out of it. In 1872 a priest is said to have chosen the site of St. Edward's University by standing under the Sorin Oak, already about a century old. Fort Worth's Turner Oak kept a farmer's gold buried in its roots through the Civil War, dug up afterward to help pay off the young town's debts.
Austin
Three live oaks stand on the rise at the north end of the original forty acres, and they were there before the university was.
In 1872, the story goes, a priest chose where to build a university by standing under a tree.
Fort Worth
About ten thousand dollars in gold spent the Civil War in the ground under this oak.
This live oak keeps watch over the oldest building in Fort Worth still standing where it was built: the Van Zandt Cottage.
For years this live oak was hidden behind a shed.
Fort Worth's official mail arrived, from 1856, at the spot where this live oak grows.
A live oak in a Fort Worth cemetery shades the graves of First World War airmen from the Royal Flying Corps.
Fort Worth's official register of heritage trees lists this live oak partly for the view and partly, with a straight face, for the stolen kisses it has watched.
This old live oak in Arrow S Park grows on what was once part of George T.
When Texas Christian University moved onto its permanent Fort Worth campus, it had exactly one tree, and the students had to bring it themselves.
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