Famous Trees of Texas

  • Famous Trees of Texas,  Hiking,  Outdoors,  Texas,  Travel & Places

    New Year’s on the Texas Coastal Bend

    We checked in with an old friend yesterday, The Big Tree, aka: The Goose Island Oak. We hadn’t been by to see it since Forest’s second birthday, before Hurricane Harvey. Of course, we had plans to visit the year he turned three but Harvey struck the week before and shattered those plans. And it has taken us this long to get back down to Rockport. She’s showing signs of wear and age but thankfully there’s a team working to keep her going after all these years. Before we made it to the oak, we stopped into the main area of Goose Island State Park to walk around and go out…

  • Famous Trees of Texas,  Outdoors

    Famous Trees of Texas | The Rio Frio Landmark (Tree 149)

    It isn’t often that we’re out in the area SW of San Antonio so when we were there this time around I made sure to grab our tree book to see what might be in the area. We were in luck, just up the road from Garner State Park was the Rio Frio Landmark tree located in the very tiny ‘town’ of Rio Frio located on the east side of the Frio River. Forest was not interested in taking a nap on Saturday afternoon despite all of my attempts to get him to lay down in the tent so we did what all parents do when they know their kid…

  • Famous Trees of Texas,  Outdoors

    Famous Trees of Texas | The Goose Island Oak (Tree 171)

    Our first stop on our vacation trip was to the ‘Big Tree’ at Goose Island State Park to get one of the Famous Trees of Texas. You may recall last year we stopped in Rockport to nab one but didn’t stop and grab this one. I had sights on getting another tree in Corpus Christi while we were on this trip but we never made it up to get it. We’d just missed a rainstorm when we arrived at the tree and thankfully it was overcast so it wasn’t too hot but the mosquitoes were out. It’s been quite awhile since I’ve hung out with that many mosquitoes—it was pretty…

  • Famous Trees of Texas,  Outdoors

    Famous Trees of Texas | The Zachary Taylor Oak ( Tree 73 )

    For the original scope behind this, visit here for our first trees. Right before we headed off for vacation earlier this month I grabbed the Famous Trees of Texas book to scout out any trees that might be around our vacation destination. I found three that were within reach, including the tree I am writing about here. The others we didn’t end up getting to, though one of them, the Goose Island Oak, we went to five years ago on our Texas roadtrip post AT thru-hike. I also visited it as a kid with my parents. Anyway, we didn’t make it back to that tree for it to count on…

  • Famous Trees of Texas,  Texas,  Travel & Places

    Finding Texas’ Famous Trees | Trees 135 & 153

    The last time Chris and I went to Westcave Preserve I was browsing through their small library of local and natural history books. I picked out one called Famous Trees of Texas. Even though it was published in the early 70s, the book looked pretty cool and I told Chris we should try to find it. Lo and behold a few weeks later one arrived in the mail that he had bought off of Ebay. It had been sitting on our coffee table for the last few months when I decided last minute over the weekend to bring it with us to Nacogdoches when we went to theSFA plant sale.…