The Old White Oak of Matthews

A long time ago, there lived a boy who loved a little tree.

He was about 10 when he dug a hole and planted the white oak sapling in his family's yard near the center of town.

Back then, there weren't many trees in the town. The people who settled there cut them down to clear the land for houses and for fields, and only the stumps remained. So many stumps, they called it Stumptown.

The Boy came from a big family, with four brothers and six sisters, and he planted his tree not far from their big, white farmhouse.

He grew up and started his own family and grew old and died, but the tree kept growing and growing and growing and growing.

The town around the tree grew, too. It grew and grew.

The day came when the town grew so big, the people in charge decided they needed a sidewalk to their new Town Hall, and they brought in a machine called a track hoe to clear the way.

One morning in March of this year, The Town Manager looked out his office window at the tree, which he did most mornings because it gave him such joy.

But this morning looking out his window, The Town Manager saw something that upset him. The track hoe had flexed its long hydraulic arm and was attacking the tree. Already, the teeth of the shovel had ripped off the lower limbs.

Down the stairs and out the building The Town Manager ran.

Stop!

Chapter 2: The Man Who Cried "Stop!"

It would have been simpler for The Town Manager of Matthews to let the track hoe finish its job and rip apart the old white oak. Much prettier and grander trees have been lost.

The white oak beside Town Hall stands as tall as a three-story house, about 60 feet high, but it doesn't have the majestic canopy of many big oaks. And, if you walk close, you'll see ugly gashes where the teeth of the track hoe dug in.

Some people might not think this particular white oak is worth saving.

Why bother? they might say.

And some have said that to The Town Manager.

The Town Manager isn't a tree hugger who runs around trying to save trees. He grew up in Florida's orange groves and climbed trees as a boy and he likes trees and appreciates what they do for us.

But he's not trying to save The White Oak because he believes one tree will make a difference, prevent global warming or save our planet.

The Town Manager used official-sounding words, the way town managers sometimes do, for why he stopped the track hoe. The tree, he said, balances the visual aesthetics around Town Hall.

He saved the tree because it's pretty.


Chapter 3: Way Back Yonder

The Woman who lives in the old white farmhouse next door to Town Hall grew up hearing tales about The White Oak. She moved there when she was a young girl many years ago, long before the Town Hall was built. Her parents told her that her grandfather planted The White Oak and several other white oaks when he was 10. It was, The Woman said, way back yonder.

Back in 1878.

That makes the tree 128 years old.

White oaks grow slowly, slower than other trees, but they live longer. Many live 300 years and more. In the world of white oaks, the one by Matthews Town Hall is middle-aged.

If they chopped it down, The Town Manager thought, somebody would figure out sooner or later that Town Hall looked a whole lot nicer with a tree beside it and they would probably plant another one.

Just think how long it would take for a new tree to become as tall and splendid as the old one.

The Town Manager wouldn't live long enough to see it. None of us would.

So that day, The Town Manager called on The Town Landscaper for advice.


Chapter 4: On Grandfather's Farm

The Landscaper grew up in a house his parents built on a corner of his grandfather's dairy farm outside Trenton, New Jersey. That's about 600 miles from Matthews and The Landscaper is a man now with grown children. But he hasn't forgotten the trees on his grandfather's farm.

The woods there were his kingdom, where he invented games and read books and built a fort that straddled the limbs of three trees. How he loved the woods on his grandfather's farm!

And then one day, the bulldozers came.

He doesn't remember the exact year, but it was when he was still young enough to cry. The bulldozers tore down his trees and ripped apart his grandfather's fields, clearing the land for houses and an expressway.

His grandfather died six months later and The Landscaper believes selling the farm is what killed him.

Since he moved to Matthews, The Landscaper has watched bulldozers roar in and trees fall down.

He told The Town Manager he would do what he could to save The White Oak.

One tree, he believes, can make a difference.


Chapter 5: An Ordinary Tree

The Landscaper knows a lot about trees, but not everything. So he called in an expert, an arborist, who knows just about everything there is to know.

The Arborist met The Landscaper beneath The White Oak. He has seen much finer white oaks. There's a beauty on Mount Holly Road in Charlotte, another on Merrifield Road and one on Whiting Avenue. Those trees are one of a kind.

The Town Manager's White Oak is not. If all of the people in the town of Matthews had 10 trees to choose from, they probably would not pick The White Oak.

The White Oak is not magnificent.

It is not willowy or graceful or majestic.

It is not elegant.

It is not dignified or grand or extraordinary or even particularly tall. It is not a tree that makes you stop and stare.

But the town does not have a bunch of trees to choose from. The town has this one white oak.

The Arborist told The Landscaper he thought it could be saved - and should be saved.

It would, The Arborist warned, take a lot of work.

The White Oak is sick.

Most roots on a tree are small. They're called feeder roots, and they grow outward and upward toward the surface, where they absorb water and minerals. The feeder roots on one entire side of The White Oak were dug up to make way for the new sidewalk and a street.

Cutting off the feeder roots would be like cutting out half of every meal you eat when you're only getting just enough.

Could you survive if that went on year after year? Would you become weak and grow ill and die?

But the tree has something going for it that we humans don't: Feeder roots regularly die and are replaced. So if no other roots were damaged, The White Oak could heal itself. It might take eight or 10 years, and it would need some help.


Chapter 6: Whose Tree Is It?

There was just one other problem.

The town doesn't own The White Oak.

It stands to reason the town would own the tree because there it lives, right beside Town Hall. But the tree is on private land, on the far back corner of a large grassy lot.

Who owns the land - and The White Oak? A man who builds houses. A developer.

Developers don't always take the side of trees. They're in the business of building houses and paving roads, and often trees get in the way. So they cut them down. It's easier and cheaper.

The Town Manager and The Landscaper knew The Developer could do whatever he wanted with The White Oak. In Matthews, you don't have to ask permission to cut down a tree. The Landscaper and Town Manager didn't want to go to all the trouble of rerouting the sidewalk to save the tree, only to have it chopped down a few years from now.

So they sent word to The Developer.

The next morning he met The Public Works Director beneath The White Oak beside Town Hall. The Developer has built thousands of homes over the years and cut down a whole lot of trees to make way for them, but that doesn't mean he doesn't like trees.

He promised to do what he could.


Chapter 7: The Girl Who Loves Trees

It just so happened that a few days later, the town was hosting its Arbor Day celebration.

And the guest speaker was a 10-year-old girl who loves trees.

She loves all different kinds of trees, oaks and pines and hickories and willows and elms, and a curious tree called the ginkgo that's been around since dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

She learned how they help us by cleaning the air. It's called photosynthesis, but it's really pretty simple.

The leaves of trees absorb light from the sun and carbon dioxide exhaled by people and cars and things like that. The roots absorb water. These ingredients collide inside the trees. They mix with the sunlight to make sugar and oxygen.

The trees use the sugar as food, and release the oxygen into the air. It's the oxygen we breathe.

Without trees, The Girl realized, we would die. So would all the animals.

Without trees, The Girl realized, it would be the end of the world.

From that day on, The Girl hated to see trees cut down. She cried when she saw them lying dead beside the road.

It scared her.

On her way to a park near her house with her mother, she would pass a tree that for some now-forgotten reason seemed special. She never knew what kind of tree it was, but she called it The Daddy Tree and would run up and hug it.

The Girl, you might say, was a tree hugger from early on.

Her mom and dad think she inherited the spirit of her great-uncle. He would dress in a uniform to look official and walk through his neighborhood in New York City planting trees.

Hundreds of trees.

When The Girl visited New York City she saw a ginkgo he planted 40 years ago. It's now as tall as a three-story brownstone.

Because The Girl loves trees so much, her mother took her to the Matthews Arbor Day celebration last year. There were only a few people there, and no other children.

Because The Girl seemed to know a lot about trees, someone in charge asked her to help with this year's celebration.

Would you give a speech?


Chapter 8: A Gift For The Girl

Nobody could have planned it better than the way it turned out.

The Girl wrote her speech about her favorite type of tree, which just happened to be

The white oak.

The American white oak has been The Girl's favorite since she was hiking one day in a forest in Charlotte called Ribbon Walk.

That day, she came upon a humongous tree, so big she couldn't wrap her arms around it. She went home and read all she could about this glorious tree with its light bark and leaves shaped like fingers and sweet acorns that birds and squirrels love to eat.

The Girl wrote her speech about the white oak without knowing about The White Oak.

She invited 80 other kids to meet her at Town Hall for the Arbor Day celebration. The town usually plants a new tree on Arbor Day, and The Girl and her friends arrived thinking that's what they were going to do.

But this spring, they celebrated the saving of an old tree, The White Oak.

A lot of boys and girls learned a lifelong lesson that morning about the importance of trees, and how one person can make a difference.

To thank The Girl for bringing her friends and making a speech, The Landscaper presented her with a white oak sapling, a few inches tall.

She took it home and named it Oliver.


Chapter 9: A Death In The Family

Oliver began life as an acorn.

After an acorn falls, it spends the winter on the ground and, if an animal doesn't eat it, the tough exterior softens. When spring comes, the embryo inside awakens and breaks through the shell and shoots roots into the ground.

A stem emerges, then leaves.

Oliver had two leaves when The Girl took him home. She put him in a terra-cotta pot, played music for him and talked to him, hoping it would help him grow big and strong. Maybe one day someone would look at her tree the way The Town Manager gazes at The White Oak every morning and wonder who planted it way back yonder.

By late summer Oliver had sprouted two more leaves, and The Girl began scouting around her yard for a home for him.

How she wishes now that she had gone ahead and transplanted Oliver.

One morning in August, her mother discovered him lying on his side. There he was in the pot, his roots ripped from the soil, torn and shriveled.

A squirrel must have attacked him.

They rushed Oliver to The Landscaper. I'm sorry, he said.

There was nothing he could do. Oliver was dead.

The Girl, an only child, was inconsolable.

Losing Oliver, she told her mother, was like losing a brother or sister.

The Landscaper hated to see The Girl cry. He dug up two white oak saplings from his front yard and gave them to her.

She named the saplings Oliver and Olivia and planted them in a corner of her backyard.

They would be safe there.

Next to them, she replanted the original Oliver, brown and brittle, hoping, as only a child could hope, that he might one day come back to life.


Chapter 10: A Tree Grows In Matthews

Back at Town Hall, they halted construction and called in engineers.

They stood around and studied The White Oak. They took measurements. They had meetings.

To save a tree that is not willowy or graceful or majestic or even particularly tall, they rerouted the sidewalk and found a new location for a sewer and built a retaining wall.

They pruned limbs and doctored wounds and sprayed against cankerworms and fertilized and watered. And watered. And watered.

Town skeptics predict the tree will die anyway.

Maybe it will.

Town skeptics predict The Developer will chop it down.

Maybe he will.

But this is Matthews, North Carolina, Tree City USA, dedicated to growing and preserving trees.

If a Tree City USA doesn't try to save a tree, how can it expect the people who live there to save trees, or The Developers who build there to save them?

The Town Manager and The Landscaper see The White Oak as a symbol of what their town stands for.

Trees, they believe, are as important as sidewalks and houses.

Think how big and beautiful Oliver and Olivia will become if they live as long as The White Oak. Think about the difference those two tiny saplings can one day make on our planet, offering shade from the sun and comfort from the wind, dropping acorns for the birds and squirrels, and creating the very air we breathe.

The Girl won't be around to see them grow as tall as a New York City brownstone. But maybe her granddaughter will.

***

THE CHARACTERS

The Boy

He was Benjamin DeWitt Funderburk. Most people knew him as B.D. He became a prominent businessman, and died in 1954 at age 86. His granddaughter, Sara Plaxco, lives in the white farmhouse.

The Town Manager

Hazen Blodgett, 46, is married, has four children, and likes to race his mountain bike along tree-lined trails.

The Landscaper

Pat Meehan, 61, was "a quiet introverted kid who liked to be by myself with the trees." Advising him on The White Oak was Tom Martin of Bartlett Tree Experts, who helped start the county's Treasure Tree Program. www.treasuretree.org

The Girl

Erin Reed, 10, is a member of the National Arbor Day Foundation. Her parents, Adam and Veronica Reed, own Sante restaurant near Town Hall.

The Developer

Skip Smith, 56, owns Hobart Smith Homes with his brother, Tony. The company has built more than 4,000 homes in North Carolina. "We always have, as builders, appreciated nice trees."


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