The Washington Monument Witness Mulberry

This tree fell over in May 2019 and the Park Service refused to remove it. Days of rain had saturated the ground on the Washington Monument lawn, the main buttress root snapped, and the larger of two old white mulberries here went down. Instead of cutting it up, arborists raised the trunk back by about ten degrees, enough to encourage new feeder roots without tearing what was left of the root plate, and built it a steel crutch. It has been standing nearly horizontal on that prop ever since, living on roughly 60 percent of its roots. Its neighbour, the shorter of the pair, leans hard and is crutched too, and is in better condition. Both are recorded by the Park Service witness tree programme as part of the landscape planted after the monument was completed in 1885, probably in the 1890s, which puts them somewhere around 130 to 140 years old. Be clear about what this is. It is not a grand tree and it is not a pretty one. It is a public agency visibly refusing to give up on something that history happened around, propped in plain sight at roughly seven o'clock on the circular path. And it is fragile: the most recent confirmation of its condition we have found dates from December 2023, so that is the last time anyone we can cite looked at it.