Harvard's Arnold Arboretum has been cataloguing plants since 1872 and did not get round to this one until 2010.
White Oak
White oak is eastern North America's slow, wide-crowned oak, tougher and longer-lived than red oak, and the three we map range from a fundraiser to a courtroom curiosity. This page maps every white oak on the site, 5 so far across 5 cities.
The oldest, on the edge of Old Logan Cemetery in Ohio, is put at roughly six hundred years; the town sells its acorns as saplings to keep the line going. Boston's grows wild on the Arnold Arboretum's Peters Hill turf, uncatalogued until 2010 and cored in 2018 to roughly two centuries old, possibly the oldest tree in the whole collection. Athens, Georgia's is younger and stranger: an eighty-year-old planted in 1946 from the acorn of a white oak an 1890 newspaper story said legally owned itself, a claim courts have never accepted and the city has never stopped repeating.
Boston
Athens, Georgia
Photo: Scott Ward (CC BY)
This oak is the son of a tree that, by local legend, owned itself.
Logan, Ohio
Logan sells this tree's children.
Princeton, New Jersey
The tree standing here is younger than most of the people who come to see it.
Wye Mills, Maryland
Maryland built a state park around a single tree and then lost it in one afternoon.
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