The Big Tree

Goose Island State Park is home to
the biggest tree in Texas.
It is a beautiful live oak tree
and is about 1,000 years old.

Mike Leggett is a reporter for the Austin American Statesman newspaper and recently wrote a wonderful article about visiting this beautiful old oak tree. He has compiled a list of 24 things a Texan should do before he/she dies. In other words he has made a Texas bucket list of things to accomplish before one "kicks the bucket".

Among the list includes visiting the whooping cranes at Aransas Wildlife Refuge, seeing the Palo Duro Canyon, and driving across Texas from east to west to get a grasp of the diversity of our state. He also includes the Big Tree and wrote a great article about it, see here for the full article.

Leggett outdid himself in my opinion when writing about this old tree nestled in the grove of other live oaks and situated along the Texas Gulf Coast near Rockport. The Karankawa Indians of whom he writes are long extinct. They were a difficult tribe and insisted on continuing their cannibalistic ways once the Europeans arrived; therefore, they are no more. They were not friends to other Indians or to settlers.

The article begins...:

"Through the fog of a mild winter morning and the gauzy haze of history, it's easy to see a pair of Karankawa men amble up from the nearby shallows of Saint Charles Bay and stop to squat a moment in the shade of a live oak motte.

They neither talk nor sing. They are naked. Their nipples and lips are pierced by slivers of cane, their bodies are tattooed head to toe, and they are smeared with alligator or animal fat to stave off the pestering bites of insects.

They crack open a few succulent oysters as a snack and stare east across the bay at what has become known as the Blackjack Peninsula, where other members of their Copanes band are encamped.

They drop the oyster shells on the ground and rise to return to the water. They'll fish their way back home. The shells will turn white, become brittle and crumble, slowly degrading in the sun and rain and returning to the earth. It is a process that builds a strong base for these trees.

The year is 1500, three decades before Spanish explorers, and later the French, would write in their journals about encountering small bands of extremely tall natives along the Texas Gulf Coast.

The Karankawa are long gone, of course. In many respects, so is the wilderness.

But the trees. Some of the trees in this small grove, trees that were hundreds of years old at the time, are still here."

~ Mike Leggett

I am partial to the beauty of the live oak and have photographed many a tree to try to capture the elegance of the flow of the branches and the wide canopy of its leaves. They are truly stately.