The Willow Oak Circle

Nobody can say whether these trees are a century old or fifty, and both answers come from the same two sources. Cross the grass south of the Vietnam Women's Memorial to the next path and you end up standing inside a tight ring of willow oaks without having meant to. That is the whole experience of the place, and both the Park Service and the National Park Trust describe visitors arriving in it by accident. The two theories run like this. One says the circle was planted in the 1920s to ring a picnic clearing, which would make the trees about a hundred. The other says they went in during the 1970s rebuilding of Constitution Gardens, done for the Bicentennial in 1976, which would make them about fifty. Neither source picks a side, and neither will we, so the age here is a range wide enough to hold two entirely different stories. What the circle has watched is not in doubt. It was already standing when the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated just south of it in 1982, and when the Women's Memorial was added in 1993. Willow oaks are the workhorse of the National Mall, planted here by the thousand along avenues and lawns. These are the ones somebody arranged into a shape on purpose. Neither source counts them, incidentally. Go and count them.