Appreciation post: the 90 year old bur oak outside the courthouse in Ann Arbor

I was in Ann Arbor for a wedding last month and walked past the courthouse square, and this bur oak stopped me cold. It's got to be 80 feet tall with a trunk I couldn't get my arms halfway around, and the city has it fenced with a little plaque saying it was planted in 1932. What got me was the cabling, some old school steel rods through the main unions, and you can see where the callus wood has completely swallowed the hardware over decades. Made me think about how much of our work outlives us and how the tree just keeps going. Anybody else stop and inspect random trees when they travel, or is that just me?

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gavin_kelly9127d ago

Man, those old steel rods getting swallowed by the tree is wild. That's like 90 years of growth just eating the hardware whole. I always stop for the big old ones when I'm walking around somewhere new.

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