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It's hard to upstage Patrick Henry, patriot and orator extraordinaire, but many visitors to Patrick Henry's last home in Brookneal, Virginia, are as interested in the tree in his front yard as they are in the patriot.
The tree, an osage-orange (Maclura pomifera), dominates the grounds at the Red Hill National Memorial the way Henry must have dominated a debate. At 321 inches in girth, 60 feet in height, and 85 feet in spread, it's the largest known of its species in the country, but it's also a shapely tree that holds its hefty branches with surprising grace. What most accounts for this tree's charisma, however, is the sense of antiquity it conveys.
"That's an OLD tree," one tourist commented to me on a day when our paths crossed beneath the tree. Not only does the tree's size suggest it has occupied this site for centuries, but its bark screams "Age!" Bumpy, soccer-ball-sized burls punctuate one side; elsewhere it's criss-crossed with deep fissures that create bold basketweave patterns.
Small wonder then that legends have grown up like weeds around this tree and that speculation is rampant about the tree's age. Red Hill literature describes the tree as the largest and oldest of its species in the country and suggests it is "between 200 and 350 years old." Other sources say, variously, that Patrick Henry's physician wept under it when Henry died, that the tree was grown from plant material brought back from the Lewis and Clark expeditions and given to Henry's daughter, and that Henry played his violin under the tree.
So many good stories surround this tree that I was at first reluctant to accept an assignment to run the legends to ground, try to sort fact from fiction, and, if possible, establish the tree's age. "Don't ruin the legend," Jeff Meyer, director of AMERICAN FORESTS' Historic Tree Nursery and author of America's Famous and Historic Trees, warned when I called to ask the source of the Lewis and Clark story he'd reported in his book.
I also wanted to tell him a dendrochronologist (a scientist who accurately dates trees using tree rings) was going to examine the tree. I fully expected to wind up in the role of spoilsport, but fortunately, truth is...