The Most Exclusive Club in America
You must be one hundred years old to hold membership in the Live Oak Society
In normal conversation about longevity, we talk in days and even minutes when the subjects are insects, in years when they are dogs or cats, and decades for people. When a man or woman lives to be one hundred, the collective breast of Homo sapiens swells with its dominance over life on Earth.
While that is the prevalent view, it is a narrow one. Centenarians may be unusual in our society, but in the world of woody perennials, trees well past the age of one hundred are common. Many varieties--redwood, bald cypress, and white cedar among them--live to be over a thousand years old. One particular stand of California bristlecone pines, estimated to be over 4,600 years of age, represents the oldest living things on this planet.
It is therefore fitting when man, the younger, honors his elders. That is why Arbor Day, Save the Redwoods League, and the American Forestry Association exist. And it is the reason for the Live Oak Society, which, in a special way, honors the live oak, or Quercus virginiana, as it is known in academic circles.
The society was proposed in 1934 by Edwin Lewis Stephens, then president of Southwestern Louisiana Institute, because, as he said, “the world does not realize what a splendid possession it holds in these trees.”
That may have been, but even then live oaks were hardly ignored. Large, majestic trees with thick, strong trunks and long limbs that stretch farther sideways than they reach up, and with their usual covering of Spanish moss, they are recognized as one of the most beautiful trees in America. And neither this tree nor its beauty fades easily. Live oaks get their name from their ability to survive southern coastal storms and the evergreen quality of their branches, which only shed leaves after new ones appear. And they’ve always been appreciated. Not only have they been immortalized in works by Walt Whitman, Sidney Lanier, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, they are the symbol of elegance of the Old South, where they are indigenous. No estate or plantation was complete without several on the grounds, and an “avenue of oaks” leading to the main house always elevated the class of the property.
But Stephens wanted more. He envisioned an organization not simply of people appreciating trees, but one in which the trees actually made up the membership, held office, and reigned till death. He introduced his idea in an issue of the Louisiana Conservation Review. Speaking of the society, he said:
“Let its membership be composed of the trees themselves! Such business of publicity as it may require may be carried on with the assistance of friends. I will volunteer my service for a time as acting secretary. I suggest that the members of the association shall consist of trees whose age is not less than a hundred years (thus affording a background of experience, maturity, and wisdom in counsel).”
So there would be no doubt as to the high quality of the society, he nominated the forty-three charter members, proposing as president the Lock Breaux Oak of Hahnville, Louisiana.
It may all sound like a joke, but Stephens was quite serious. He went ahead and founded his organization, and in its early years he added fourteen trees to the original list. But after his death in 1938 the society floundered, until the responsibility eventually fell to the Louisiana Garden Club Federation in 1957. Since then it has thrived. The federation has written a constitution, complete with articles and bylaws, and printed them in pamphlets for prospective sponsors. It’s also designed and printed certificates of membership, attractive cards colored green-and-white and bearing the picture of a live oak. But most impressive, it has increased the membership to nearly eight hundred trees.
The current secretary is Edith Pfister, an energetic woman who, widowed and with her daughter grown and on her own, has adopted the live oaks as her family.
“We feel our trees are living things,” she told me one morning in her home in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans. “It’s our job to protect them; we feel the more trees that are members, the better we can do that.”
A Louisiana Garden Club member for twenty-eight years, Edith Pfister sat at her dining room table, the files and folders and scrapbooks of the Live Oak Society spread out before her. She’s been the society’s secretary, and only human member, since 1979, when she requested the job. Most of her responsibilities are represented in those folders-forms for registration, pamphlets about the society, and page upon page of lists of every member, its location and size-for she is the person to contact if you want to sponsor a tree for membership, and she keeps the records. She also handles the infrequent inquiries from the press, and occasionally speaks to garden clubs throughout the state about live oaks and the society.
“We have no legal power,” she said, “but we hope that by registering the trees more attention will be drawn to them, and they’ll end up getting better care.”
She moved one folder aside and reached for a second. Her thick glasses only partially correct her severe vision problem, and it took a few more minutes before she found what she sought: a little four-page list of the voluntary regulations that apply to tree owners in the eight southern states where there are members.
“The bylaws are to insure that care,” she said, beginning to recite them by heart. “Members shall not be whitewashed. No members shall be desecrated with advertisements. That means no signs. And most important, thou shalt not kill any member.”
• • •
As part of the society’s effort to personalize its trees, each one is named, and that name is printed on the official Live Oak Society Certificate of Membership, issued upon joining. Some sponsors name their trees after the town where they grow, like the DeLisle Oak in DeLisle, Mississippi. Some name them after themselves, like Dr. G. A. Martin’s Martin Oak. But many choose other sources. Historical names are popular: George and Martha Washington used to live comfortably in the Audubon Zoological Garden in New Orleans, till George died a few years ago; Martha lives on, among the rhinoceros there. There are lofty references—King Oak and Freedom Oak—and folksy ones—like Pat, Susan, and Sarah Jane Oaks. Some are dramatic—Suicide Oak and Dueling Oak; some picturesque—Snow Flake Oak and Sunset Oak; and others very literal—Big Oak and Lone Oak. One, in Schriever, Louisiana, is just called Rusty.
It must be assumed these efforts of the society are at least party successful. They do draw attention to member trees, and that frequently improves their chances for survival. Surely some don’t need help. (The owners of Middleton Place, a famed tourist attraction outside Charleston, South Carolina, have spent an estimated $5,000 over the past three years to maintain the magnificent thousand-year-old Middleton Oak, which is a member of the society.) But for others, their association with the society has been important.
Everyone in the Charleston area knew about the great Angel Oak on Johns Island, reputed to be over 1,400 years old, but since its induction into the society in 1968 it’s become a major attraction. It’s been fenced in, and a dollar charge added to help defray the cost of upkeep. Eleven thousand people helped support Angel Oak last year.
The six live oaks on the grounds of Sunnybrook, the home of Mrs. William Gibert, in Covington, Louisiana, were well known to friends and neighbors; but when they joined the society en masse one November afternoon in 1973, the champagne event—attended by five hundred people, including local politicians and a minister to bless the trees—made headlines in both Covington-St. Tammany newspapers, the Farmer and the News-Banner. The six trees—the most members at a single residence—have attracted reporters, artists, and tourists, and that recognition has helped stop the progress of a four-lane highway scheduled to run through Mrs. Gibert’s frontyard.
And while the Seven Sisters Oak, located just north of Lake Pontchartrain near Mandeville, Louisiana, has always been famous as a local attraction, its acceptance into the society led to national prominence.
For forty years a great controversy had raged concerning that huge and graceful oak, originally considered for membership by Stephens himself in 1936, but rejected. Its name comes from its sectioned trunk, appearing to be seven trunks, and he felt—along with many others—that it was in fact not one tree but seven. The society had the tree reexamined in 1965, and it was judged to be the product of one root system and therefore one tree, and it was admitted as a member.
Soon after that the society’s president, the Lock Breaux Oak, which had served for thirty-two years, died. The Seven Sisters’ qualifications, its 55 feet in height, the 132-foot limb spread, and the trunk circumference of 36 feet 7 inches, measured at the standard level of 4½ feet from the ground, were enough for it to be elected president in May 1968, that honor going to the largest tree in the society.
Attention from all that led to further examination by the American Forestry Association. In 1976 it agreed with the one-tree decision, and the points accumulated by the oak’s dimensions were enough for first place in the live oak category of the association’s National Registry of Big Trees. That makes the Seven Sisters the biggest tree of its species in America.
The tree is owned by Ellie and Milton Seiler, who only recently had moved from New Orleans, just across the twenty-four-mile Lake Pontchartrain Causeway.
“It’s almost like living with royalty,” said Ellie Seiler, who along with her husband looked for two years north of the lake for “the right” piece of property on which to build their new home, which now stands adjacent to the Seven Sisters. “You really get the feeling that you’re living beside a figure in history,” she said.
An attractive, meticulously dressed woman, she was standing on the second-floor gallery of her home, looking out at the tree. It completely dominated the yard, dwarfing the house, some of its long, reaching limbs almost touching the railing. She stood there for several minutes, appreciating the sight she saw every day as if seeing it for the first time, and then she went on.
“People come from all over the country just to see it,” she said. “Some knock on the door to ask questions, some just drive up, get out, and start walking around. We have photographers, schoolchildren, artists. The neighborhood kids all come and climb it.”
She paused, and smiled.
“We have young lovers, who drive right up and park under the limbs. They’ve probably been doing it for years around here, and the addition of this house doesn’t stop them one bit.” She had been looking at the tree as she talked, but then she turned to me.
“That tree’s a genuine personality,” she said, lowering her voice, “and having it here gives us a tremendous amount of pleasure.”
• • •
But the Live Oak Society is, at least in theory, an organization of trees and not people. It is not unreasonable then to question the ultimate value of all this attention to the society’s actual members. Just how does being considered royalty—being looked up to, cared for, honored—compare with the position the trees held in previous generations?
During the past century, live oaks have been admired mostly for their beauty. But before that, both trees and their attending moss had a long and varied record of service in this country. Unofficially, the great limbs were popular for supporting lynch ropes, at the other end of which hung horse thieves. Duels traditionally were fought at the local oak at dawn; and the shade of these trees provided the perfect setting for signing treaties and composing poems, songs, and sonnets.
Officially, the oak was the tree most coveted by the U.S. Navy for the better part of two centuries. Because its wood is so hard, so able to withstand the alternate wetting and drying to which ship timbers are subjected, the government purchased vast tracts of land throughout the southern states, protecting what live oaks there were and planting more for the future. While too heavy and hard for general use as planking, its wood was perfect for such interior construction as frames, keels, knees, and beams.
That condition of extreme desirability, which lasted through most of the 1700s and 1800s, changed only after the Civil War, when the United States began to tum to ships made of iron.
As for the ever-present Spanish moss, it enjoyed years of popularity as stuffing for horse collars, upholstery, and mattresses. It is a living plant, a bromeliad, drawing nourishment from rainwater and the air, and it had to be killed, usually by drowning, then dried and cured. But it was easily gathered from the trees with huge poles, and the “moss hair” made a springy cushion.
However, all that is history. Little remains for the live oak but to be appreciated and protected by organizations such as the Live Oak Society.
Getting a live oak to comment on this role change is not easy. They are, by nature, a silent lot. But I am a patient man, and experienced in these areas. I recall from my youth in Ohio long conversations with the buckeye tree outside a friend’s house in Cincinnati, and some with a particularly lovely willow on the family farm in Lancaster. Buckeyes are, of course, horsechestnuts, and chatty. And willows, well, they have a reputation for being painfully sentimental. But they gave me valuable early experience. Interviewing a live oak is no way to begin a career.
After talking with Ellie Seiler, I walked out to her frontyard, almost completely filled by the Seven Sisters. I patted the great oak respectfully on one of its huge, moss-covered limbs and casually asked how its term as president of the society was going. It was late afternoon, under a threatening March sky, and a strong wind blew off Lake Pontchartrain, not three hundred yards away. I listened, but heard only the wind. And then the noble tree creaked, and I took that as an executive “No comment.”
I hung around for a few more minutes and, when nothing followed, was about to leave when I heard a rushing of leaves from the live oak on the adjoining property nearer the lake. It was a young tree, not as grand as the Seven Sisters, but with a similar configuration of horizontal limbs stretching out from its trunk. Clearly, it was not a member of the society. A tree house was perched at the base of one of its limbs, a highway STOP sign hung on the door by some young builder.
I strolled over, moved close to the trunk, and tried to think of an appropriate opening line. I didn’t get the chance.
“Don’t bother talking to her,” came a voice, deep and slow, from somewhere beneath the bark. “Since they made her president, she’s been a pain.”
I nodded in polite agreement, and at the same time looked around to be sure we were alone. One must be cautious when talking with trees in unfamiliar surroundings. But the house nearby, apparently a summer home, looked quite deserted.
“Reporter?” asked the voice.
I confessed that I was.
“She never talks to reporters. Kids, sometimes, but no reporters.”
I commented that he didn’t seem to mind questions.
“I’m no celebrity. Fire away!” I decided to get right to the heart of the matter and asked how he felt about the Live Oak Society.
“Registration without representation,” came the surprise response. “Trees are members, but they don’t vote. They don’t vote on bylaws, they don’t vote on presidents. I wouldn’t have a woman president.”
Politics was clearly not a safe subject, so I tried to get him to reminisce. I asked if he weren’t glad the old days were over, that live oaks were no longer being cut down regularly. There was a brief pause, and then:
“I’ll be one hundred thirty-seven next month,” said the voice. “I really just missed all of that. But I know about it. My father was top-timbers on the U .S.S. Constitution. My brother, the sternpost and transom of the sloop-of-war Powhatan.”
The voice stopped, and I could hear the thick limbs stretch, as if taking a deep breath, and remembering.
“Those were proud times,” said the voice. “You had time to be young, time with birds and squirrels and kids, time to spread your seed. But when you were full-grown, they’d come along in the winter when your sap was low and cut you down. Then it was time to serve. That’s a proud thing. There’s more to life than being shade.”
I asked if he were against the society, then.
“Never said that. It has a place. It’s especially nice for the old ones. They need taking care of.”
The implication was clear, and I asked if he too didn’t need a little pruning now and then.
“I can take care of myself,” came the defiant response. “Anyhow, I’m no joiner.”
I pointed out that he was a fine-looking tree, and over a hundred, and asked what made him think the society wouldn’t induct him with or without his consent.
There was a grunt, from deep inside, kind of a woody laugh.
“See this tree house? Built it myself. They wouldn’t want a tree with a house in it.”
It was my turn to laugh.
“You’re a crafty old tree, aren’t you?”
There was a slight shudder, almost an expression of shyness, then a straightening of the trunk.
“It’s my heritage,” said the voice. “My great-uncle carried Jean Lafitte.”