A four-hundred-year-old bur oak standing alone in a Missouri floodplain, drawn at the exact ten minutes of evening when the sky does something unreasonable. Free in three formats below. No email, no cart, no popup begging for your attention.
Four hundred rings and one bad road shoulder
Take Providence Road south out of Columbia until it becomes Route K, follow it west until it becomes Burr Oak Road, and about two miles northwest of McBaine there it is on your right — standing by itself in a farm field, no other tree within a thousand feet. Locals just call it the Big Tree, which is the kind of name you only earn by being unmistakable.
The numbers are absurd. Ninety feet tall, a canopy a hundred and thirty feet across, and a trunk measuring 287 inches around — roughly four adults holding hands. It is the largest bur oak in Missouri and tied with one in Kentucky for the largest in the entire country. Estimates put it somewhere between 350 and 400 years old, which means it was already a substantial tree when Lewis and Clark rowed past within sight of it in 1804.
It has also had a rough four centuries. The 1993 flood left it standing in six feet of water for six weeks. Lightning has found it more than once — in October 2020 it was hit again and discovered burning from the inside, and the scar is still there. Trees don’t heal so much as seal, and it sealed. It sits on land the Williamson family has farmed since 1835, and the current owner’s assessment of its prospects is hard to argue with: it will outlive all of us.
I drew it from the road shoulder at last light, which is the only time that sky happens and also the only time a car will nearly hit you. Everything here is flat vector shapes in five layers — canopy, trunk, far treeline, field, sky — no gradients, no textures, no brushes. The clouds took the longest. Clouds always take the longest.
The layered AI file is organised, named, and unlocked. Recolour it, crop it, put it on a tote bag. I have made peace with the tote bags.