The Cork Trees of the FDR Memorial

In 1962 the National Park Service went looking for a record of who planted these trees and found that nobody had written it down. The letter noting the gap survives. Rather than treat an unrecorded planting as an accident to be tidied away, the Service kept them on the grounds that they were, in its own words, very attractive old trees. That is the entire provenance of a small stand of Amur cork trees growing on ground where almost everything else has a paper trail. They were here long before the memorial they now sit inside. The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial was dedicated in 1997 and its landscape was laid out around plantings left from an older scenic drive along the Tidal Basin. A sign beside the trees calls them eighty years old, which would put the planting somewhere around the 1930s, but the sign's own date is not known, so read eighty as a minimum and roughly a century as the working figure. You will recognise them by their manners rather than their height. Amur cork trees throw heavy, low, sprawling limbs, and these have let theirs down onto the ground, which is why the Park Service has put up two signs asking people not to climb them. The bark is thick and deeply corky, which is where the species gets its name. Walk past the visitor centre restrooms and follow the waterfront path between Room Three and the water.