This is the Kile Oak. It is the largest bur oak in Marion County, Indiana and thus the biggest in the city of Indianapolis. It is 5ft DBH. My first picture shows a paper lunch bag at the bottom so you can see kinda how big it is, but like many things the picture doesn't do it justice as seeing it in person.

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It grew from an acorn that sprouted some time around 1600CE. So it's older than this fascist bs country, state, and city by a fair amount. The flavor of the unprocessed acorns is fairly palatable. If you've ever eaten an acorn that isn't palatable you know.

We can speculate a lot but don't really know much about how bur oak came to be more palatable than other oaks. This particular one could be the great granddaughter of an oak the adena or hopewell bred for flavor, planted by any number of groups like the Natchez (probably a little to NE for them but Indigenous people did travel a lot) or some other Mississipian tribe, but more likely Miami or Shawnee. Also a bird might have planted it! In context there were still millions of passenger pigeons in the sky at the time, along with lots of other things that liked to carry acorns around. The palatability is probably a conscious design executed by skilled Indigenous people going back many, many generations, and the acorn may have just landed there. :)

Read more here: https://www.irvingtonhistory.org/visit/exhibits/kile-oak/

#ThickTrunkTuesday #Oak #Quercus #Macrocarpa #trees