A four-hundred-year-old bur oak standing alone in a Missouri floodplain under a sky that looked theatrical enough to seem dishonest.
Notes
Four hundred rings and one bad road shoulder
This piece is about scale and isolation before it is about botany. One tree, by itself, in a flat field, with nothing nearby to soften the fact of how large it is. The composition only works because the tree gets to stand there like a verdict.
The facts help. It is about ninety feet tall, roughly 130 feet across, and the trunk measures 287 inches around. It is the largest bur oak in Missouri and tied for the largest in the country. At 350 to 400 years old, it was already a mature tree when Lewis and Clark passed within sight of it in 1804, which is rude in the best possible way.
It has also survived with more grit than dignity. Floodwater in 1993. Lightning more than once. In 2020 it was found burning from the inside, which sounds fictional until you see the scar. Trees do not heal so much as seal, and this one has apparently decided that will do.
I drew it from the road shoulder at last light because that was when the sky stopped behaving sensibly. Eight flat colors, no gradients. The canopy is built from a couple of greens over a black structure, the clouds do most of the atmospheric heavy lifting, and the road stripe is the one warm interruption in the frame. The clouds took the longest, because of course they did.
