The Alexandria Bicentennial Willow Oak

By the City of Alexandria's reckoning, this willow oak was probably a seedling around 1707, a quarter of a century before George Washington was born. When the city surveyed it in 1976 the estimate was 270 years, and the arithmetic has held since. In 1977 it was designated Alexandria's Bicentennial Tree. It is also enormous. Measured in November 2024, the trunk is 208 inches round, about 5.3 metres, and the tree stands 116 feet tall, about 35 metres, with a crown 105 feet across. The city scored it at 350 points, the formula American big-tree registers use to add girth, height and spread together. It has not come through untouched. A large limb has gone from one side. It is one of seventeen trees Alexandria named in the 1970s as Living Witnesses of the American Revolution, and by the city's count one of only two still standing on public land. The other is a sweet gum in Alexandria National Cemetery in Old Town. The age is an estimate, not a ring count, and the city does not publish how it was made. On our Washington map the white oak at Travilah in Maryland is still reckoned older. Getting here takes commitment. The tree stands about 100 yards in from the Duke Street entrance to the Holmes Run Trail, opposite the Beatley Central Library, and from downtown Washington that is Metro to King St-Old Town and a bus west along Duke Street, about 45 to 50 minutes in all.