Quercus virginiana, also known as the southern live oak, is a large evergreen tree endemic to the southeastern US.  Ranging from coastal Virginia to west Texas, they are a common sight from farms to suburban streets.  If there’s any plant that’s emblematic of the Deep South, it’s probably the live oak.

 

President Calvin Coolidge vacationed at The Cloister at Sea Island during the winter of 1928-29.  Located in coastal Georgia about halfway between Savannah and Jacksonville, The Cloister was a rather new but already acclaimed resort.  The hotel owners were naturally pleased to have such a distinguished guest, and asked the President if he would commemorate the occasion by planting a live oak sapling.

 

Coolidge obliged them, though any remarks he might have had are lost to history.

Since then, it’s become traditional for any current or former head of state who is visiting The Cloister to plant a live oak when he (with the exceptions of Queen Juliana of the Netherlands and Lady Margaret Thatcher of England, it’s always been a he) visits.  Eisenhower, Ford, Carter, and George H. W. Bush all have their own oaks lining the front edge of the property.

 

Coolidge’s tree, since named the Constitution Oak, has been enclosed in a courtyard as the hotel expanded.  On my last visit around New Year’s Day, I saw it just outside my balcony every day:

 

 

On the last day of our vacation, I hatched my cockamamie scheme.  Arising early, I scoured the ground beneath the tree for acorns, coming up with a half dozen in about as many minutes of searching.

 

Doing a bit of research, I found that oaks root best after the chance of frost has passed, so the acorns stayed in a bag on my living room coffee table for a couple of months.  The second week of March, it was time to plant.

 

 

Each acorn went into fresh potting mix, covered loosely with an inch or so of soil.  The pots get a few hours of filtered Florida sunshine daily, and are watered twice weekly — or whenever I remember.

 

This experiment probably isn’t going to work, for various reasons.  Live oaks typically drop their acorns in September and October, meaning the ones that I found on the ground had been sitting there for at least two months.  So the acorns might not be viable.  I’ll probably lose a few to marauding squirrels, who are more than happy to investigate my pots and consume the tasty treats just under the soil surface.  And even if I do get some plants out of this, I can’t keep them.  There’s nowhere on my property that’s far enough away from the house’s foundation and pipes to put one of the things.  So the best I can hope for is to keep one in a sufficiently large planter until the wife retires and we move somewhere with sufficient land, or I give them away to Glibs and friends.

 

So it’s a mildly dumb thing that I’m doing that probably won’t bear fruit, so to speak.  But all it cost me was a few minutes of my time and a couple dollars’ worth of potting soil.  And while the resulting trees, if any, will be genetically identical to the tens of millions of live oaks around the country, I’ll know their provenance.  There’s a small part of me that thinks having a daughter of Silent Cal’s oak tree would be kinda neat.

 

 

Now we wait….