The Wye Oak (clone)

Maryland built a state park around a single tree and then lost it in one afternoon. The Wye Oak was the largest known white oak in the United States, believed to be over 460 years old, and the state tree of Maryland for more than sixty years. A severe thunderstorm destroyed it on 6 June 2002. It had been copied just in time. Frank Gouin, a horticulture professor at the University of Maryland, led an effort to clone the tree by grafting, partly for its size and age and partly because it shrugged off oak wilt and gypsy moth in a way other white oaks did not. Two of those grafts went into the ground at Mount Vernon on 26 April 2002, six weeks before the storm. A genetic clone was planted here on 6 June 2006, four years to the day after the fall, on the old site and near the remains of the original trunk. So what stands in the park is not a big tree. It is the same tree, genetically, in the same place, about twenty years into a life its parent ran for four and a half centuries. It was photographed alive and growing here in July 2025. Come for that rather than for the girth.