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AMERICAN FORESTRY 



"HALL OFj FAME" FOR TREES 



In the beautiful cemetery known as Magnolia Garden in a 

 suburb of Charleston, South Carolina, is an oak that is a 

 rival of old St. Michael itself; a rival on account of the 

 attention it receives from the many visitors into this charm- 

 ing, old Southern city. This oak is of the variety which is 

 always green, and it has a fantastic drapery of the gray 

 Spanish moss. The splendid old tree is estimated by anti- 

 quarians to be at least seven centuries old. Though there 

 is no historic story connected with it, it has been nominated 

 in the Hall of Fame by Miss Viola Overmann on account of 



THE CHARLESTON OLD OAK 



its age, its size, its beauty, and its natural swing-curved 

 branches. A tree in a cemetery must needs live a very quiet, 

 melancholy, secluded life. But perhaps this old tree knows 

 many things of interest as it has not always graced a ceme- 

 tery. It was standing years and years before the cemetery 

 was laid out around it. And the city of Charleston has had 

 more than its share of turbulent history. 



A New England writer, a lover of trees made an especial 

 study of the oak. He learned that while other trees shirk 

 the work of resisting gravity, the oak defies it. It chooses 

 the horizontal directions for its limbs so that their whole 



weight may tell and then stretches out fifty or sixty feet, so 

 that the strain may be mighty enough to be worth resisting. 

 To slant upward would mark infirmity of purpose; to bend 

 downward, weakness of organization. 



Two branches of this Charleston oak do bend downward; 

 one touching the ground, making an artistic seat; the other, 

 curving down, then up and out again. The massive trunk 

 leans somewhat the result of a fierce tornado, or perhaps 

 a tell-tale reminder of the disastrous earthquake which 

 visited this city many years ago. But time and nature have 

 healed the wound, and the branches still live and flourish. 





