The "Giving Tree"
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As we approach the greenhouse, notice a White Oak towering over the greenhouse complex. This was the centerpiece of Stoneleigh’s WWI-era gardening and horticultural training program for young women. A recent owner and his children nicknamed this the "Giving Tree".
In a highly detailed map of Stoneleigh produced by the renowned landscape architects Olmsted Brothers, we see this white oak surveyed with 30” diameter. Now it is over 40" in diameter, a century after the Olmsted map was produced. It’s not the biggest white oak on the map (though they were and are all connected underground, through their root and fungi networks that keep soil stable and protect against erosion), but given its location it can serve as an anchor to trace this landscape through time, back to the turn of the century, in a photograph of the greenhouse complex in a 1903 House and Garden article.
Can we go farther back in time? The only accurate way to measure a tree's age is by counting its rings. Estimating age by measuring the diameter of a living tree with a known growth rate is a less-than-exact science, but can be a useful heuristic. Various calculators estimate that a 30” white oak is approximately 150 years old. Which means now, a century after this Olmsted Brothers map was produced, this white oak has grown to be about 250 years old and is older than the United States.
Oak trees are wind pollinated, and they mature & reach peak acorn production when approximately 50-100 years old. Only a tiny proportion of acorns successfully make the transformation from uneaten seedling to mature tree, so we might infer that the tree we see today grew from an acorn created by a parent tree that started growing sometime between 1672-1722.
Was this parent tree planted by the first settlers of this place, Quaker refugees traveling from Wales, who arrived in the late 1680s and 1690s and cleared the land as far as the eye could see to create farms, build structures, and supply the water-powered paper mills of Mill Creek? Or did this parent tree provide shade, medicine, wood, and sustenance to the Lenape people, whose ancestors date back 12,000 years and stewarded this land for countless generations? The ancestors of this parent tree, a valuable keystone species, most certainly did.
This white oak is especially valuable for the squirrel population. There are two distinct types of oak trees, white and red/black. Acorns from the white oaks develop on the tree in spring and summer and germinate upon landing. They actually sprout in only a few months. Acorns from trees in the red/black group fall in late summer and fall and don't sprout but have a cold dormant season. They take 18 months to develop. Squirrels know the difference between these two types of acorns and will nip off the embryo of the white oak acorns to keep them from sprouting so they are able to store them for winter and enjoy them!
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