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| A pretty Ginkgo at Crapo Park |
The champion Bald Cypress having been located—maybe?— at Aspen Grove Cemetery, the next stop on the Burlington Big Tree Hunt was the big, beautiful Crapo Park, located at the south end of town.
At 85 acres, Crapo Park is a bit smaller than Aspen Grove, and the landscape feels considerably more orderly. Established in 1895, the park includes, in addition to the arboretum, a small constructed lake housing goldfish; a memorial to Zebulon Pike, who is said to have raised the first U.S. flag on Iowa land in 1805 as he explored the Mississippi River; a replica log cabin; and a magnificent twisting red slide, among many other features.
But the draw for this day was the arboreal residents, specifically a few choice specimens of personal interest from the Big Tree list: Blackjack Oak and Dawn Redwood (a Bald Cypress lookalike). Again, my blundering about without a plan nearly rendered the quest impossible, but my steadfast companions, better planners and more adept with mobile data, discovered that Burlington has both a tree list and a tree map of Crapo Park, with trees marked with little numbered metal tags. So armed with the vague locations from the Big Tree list and the map, we walked the park west to east, admiring all the magnificent specimens along the way.
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| Champion Bur Oak at Crapo Park |
Not on my list, but difficult to overlook, were the spreading branches of the champion Bur Oak, near the lake. The venerable specimen had a trunk circumference of almost 16 feet, with a crown that spreads over 100 feet.
Near the "electric fountain" on the map was my first target: the Dawn Redwood ("Tree # 777' S. of baldcypress grove E. part of Crapo Park" as described on the Big Tree list). We located the grove of Bald Cypress trees easily enough, but where was the Dawn Redwood? None of the individuals in the area seemed to have the gravitas of a champion, with trunks fairly slender when considered against the earlier Bur Oak.
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| Dawn Redwood, Crapo Park |
But there, almost as if in disguise, was one tree whose leaves were just a little more green than the russet of the cypresses. A definitive numbered tag was not evident, but its location matched that shown on the map. An examination of the leaves confirmed the ID: the small leaflets were attached opposite one another, as opposed to alternating leaflets of a Bald Cypress.
The #2 champion Dawn Redwood of Iowa is a tall, skinny thing: less than 5 feet around the trunk, and 67.5 feet tall. Unlike the Bald Cypress, Dawn Redwood is a native of China—though it was found on our continent tens of millions of years ago, alongside dinosaurs. It was thought to be extinct until it was "rediscovered" in 1941. Seed collected from those isolated groves was brought to the U.S. and propagated; Dawn Redwood is now a regular landscape tree. Any individuals planted here would be a relatively youthful 60 years of age or younger.
The second tree on our quest, the Blackjack Oak, was another somewhat puny individual. Tree # 465 along Potter Avenue was not of a stature that would rate a second look normally: 5.5 feet around the trunk, and just over 47 feet tall. This species is native to the southeastern U.S., with its range just barely reaching the very southern edge of Iowa. The leaves, described as bell-shaped, are quite distinct from those of what we might typically think of with the pointy lobes of red oaks and the rounded lobes of white oaks. This late in the season there wasn't much to it, many of the leaves having already dropped.
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| Blackjack Oak, tree # 465 |
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| Blackjack Oak's bell-shaped leaf |
Do you know any state champion trees? Why not plan a pilgrimage in the coming year and visit the state champion of your favorite tree?
(There are six champions in Iowa City. How many could you find?)
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