From a small acorn grows a mighty mystery

Georgia tree lovers may be in mourning this week after what some believed to be the state’s second oldest live oak tree collapsed Monday in Brunswick, according to The Brunswick News. The live oak was thought to be more than 400 years old.

That a giant live oak fell is true, though the national Live Oak Society does not have that tree on record, said Chairwoman Coleen Landry, the only human allowed in the organization composed of the nation’s most treasured live oaks.

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Bobby Haven/Brunswick News

One of several giant limbs crushed this 2005 Hyundai.

• Photos: More views of the colossal oak

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Whether the tree is indeed the state’s second oldest live oak is unclear, but it begs the question, where is the oldest? And what or where is the state’s oldest living tree, anyway?

Tough call, experts say. While many people may whisper about a tree’s ancient heritage or claim the massive white oak in their yard was planted before the Civil War, a tree basically has to die for its age to be determined.

“There’s no way to be sure without cutting the tree down and counting its rings,” said master arborist Art Morris of Bartlett Tree Experts.

Gary Peiffer, an arborist and University of Georgia Cooperative Extension agent in DeKalb County, explains: “Estimating a tree’s age isn’t practical or exact because it depends on site conditions as far as how large or how fast it will grow.”

Sure, experts have tools to help them estimate, including an increment borer, which like a spinal tap bores into the tree and retrieves a thin section of the trunk. But using such a device can damage the tree, Morris said, and who wants to do that?

A resistograph drills into the side of a tree and measures the density of the wood, but it’s nowhere near as accurate as seeing the rings.

That’s why tree experts such as UGA horticulture professor Tim Smalley take age claims with a grain of salt. He’s much more interested in the stories behind the tree rather than the age itself, which fueled his “Significant Trees of Georgia” project documenting trees with interesting histories throughout Georgia.

“People ask me to guess the age of the tree, but I’ve been amazed [at the truth] too often,” he said. “You think the trees here on campus may be 150 years old, and then you see a picture from 1936 when they were just planted.”

“Unless we know when it was planted, we don’t have a good way to tell,” he said.

Short of cutting it down, of course.

Both Smalley and Morris said it’s conceivable that the Brunswick tree was 400 years old; live oaks — also Georgia’s state tree — can certainly live that long in ideal conditions.

Defining an “old tree” in Atlanta, however, is relative.

“The likelihood of a tree being [400 years old] is pretty slim, said Ed Macie, who directs U.S. Forest Service’s Urban Forestry Program in the southern states. Most trees were removed during the Civil War to build Atlanta and support the rail system, he said.

Water oaks, more common to the Atlanta area, live a relatively short life of 120-150 years, Morris said, while white oaks can thrive for two centuries.

Landry said experts have used boring devices on some of Louisiana’s most famous live oaks, including the Seven Sisters Oak in Lake Pontchartrain, thought to be 1,200 years old.

Finding that kind of history in Atlanta is hard to come by, experts said. There may not be an exact database of historic trees in the Atlanta area, but many pointed to a Southern red oak at The Gilbert House in Southwest Atlanta as one of the city’s most cherished trees.

Macie said the magnolia tree behind the Home Depot on Ponce de Leon Avenue is more than 100 years old. The tree is significant, he explains, because it stood in centerfield of the former Atlanta Crackers baseball field.

And Marcia Bansley, executive director of Trees Atlanta, named such notable trees as a black oak estimated to be 250 years old at the Our Lady of Perpetual Help nursing home in Southwest Atlanta, and white oaks thought to be at least 150 years old at the Connolly Nature Park in East Point.

Bansley reiterated that age estimates are educated guesses at best, but regardless of the trees’ true age, she’s thankful they are there.

“There was an article one time that said there are no old trees in Atlanta because Sherman burned them all down, but that’s not true,” Bansley said with a laugh.

Atlanta landscape architect and historian Edward Daugherty said the city’s oldest trees are likely found in the hardest-to-reach places “because people couldn’t get to there to do something terrible to it.” White oaks and American Beeches are among Atlanta’s oldest tree species, he said.

But like the others, he is less concerned with the age of trees than their function: to clean our air, give us shelter and protect us from the hot Southern sun.

“The importance of trees, young and old, is what will get us through life,” he said.

Smalley, who continues to document the state’s significant trees, understands that age is often intertwined with the love of a particular tree.

“People are always attracted to things that are lasting and permanent,” he said. “People appreciate something that has witnessed their lives.”