Roughly 250 years of growth twist through the Treaty Oak, an octopus-like southern live oak, Quercus virginiana, rooted in Treaty Oak Park on Downtown Jacksonville's Southbank. You can feel the weight of its roughly 250 years as you gaze up: a trunk over 25 feet in circumference, rising to about 70 feet, with a crown that spreads over 145 feet. Its twisting branches bow to the ground and curl back up, shading a roughly circular area about 190 feet in diameter.
Listen to this tree's layered story: long known as the Giant Oak, its name changed in the 1930s when journalist Pat Moran of the Florida Times-Union crafted a history to protect it. He wrote that a treaty had been signed beneath these branches by indigenous Floridians and early European settlers, and he called it the Treaty Oak. The idea echoes older, apocryphal tales of peace accords between Native Americans and Spanish or American settlers supposedly made here.
This oak may be the single oldest living thing in Jacksonville, predating the city's founding by Isaiah Hart during the 1820s. Feel the cool shade beneath the curling branches above, and the wide sweep of its crown stretching over you.