|
|
 |
 |
| << Back to the previous page |
|
In order to create a post please Login or Create an Account.
|
|
The Colonel's Tree
|
|
March 19, 2010 3:56 PM by Nick
|
 In August of 1868 Colonel Richard Dunbar, riddled with disease and in the throes of a diabetes induced attack, did something quintessentially human. He sought comfort at the base of a majestic tree. In Dunbar’s case, the tree was a soaring white oak.
As many in southeastern Wisconsin (and most in Waukesha) know, Colonel Dunbar drank from a small spring beside the oak and felt better. He continued to drink and contemplate the spreading crown above him and the buttressed trunk beside him. The Colonel, who had been given only months to live, felt cured. He lived for another ten years and made Waukesha, the spring waters (which he named Bethesda) and the white oak world-famous.
They called it the Dunbar Oak and made it the focal point of Bethesda Park.
 Nothing lasts forever…not even oak trees. The Dunbar Oak, weakened by an ice storm in 1976 and by a pocket of decay, came down in July of 1991 when high winds snapped the 5’ diameter trunk off about ten feet above the ground. A ring count showed the tree to be over 320 years old.
Visit the nursery offices here in Menomonee Falls and you’ll discover, as I did recently, an understated plaque engraved, of course, in hardwood. It quietly thanks Johnson’s Nursery for returning the Dunbar Oak to Bethesda Park. The plaque is dated February 1, 2005.
Huh? As talented as my co-workers are, even they can’t bring a 320 year old oak back from the dead. Can they?
Turns out they can…and did.
Trunk sprouts, small shoots about 6” long, were cut from the Dunbar Oak and brought to the nursery where they were grafted onto 3 year old oak root stock. Two of the grafts took and were planted in a corner of the nursery in secret. Twelve years later, with a trunk diameter of 4”, a genetically identical Dunbar Oak was reborn. Hand dug and drum laced (a disappearing art) the oak was installed with much pomp and ceremony on May 4, 2004 at the site of the original. They watered it in with 15 gallons of donated Bethesda Springs bottled water.
Looking around this morning at the towering trees surrounding nursery headquarters, mysterious in the thickening March fog, I can almost imagine 320 years from now and a 70 foot tall oak, spreading wide, next to a seeping spring.
|
|
|
|
| Post a comment |
| You must be logged in to post a comment. Click here to log in. |
|
|
|