The third largest cottonwood in Oliver's Woods. I have thought of this as the 'Carpenter Cottonwood' after Charles Carpenter who worked all around this tree and the surrounding ravines cut into the upper terrace, documenting the decades-long lives of the box turtles that live in Oliver's Woods. Carpenter and his students established a grid in Oliver's Woods for their observations with lasting steel posts each 4 foot long and one inch diameter. Sixty-five years later, there are a dozen of these posts, of the original three or four dozen, that remain in place, revealing the old grid. One of these posts was within a meter of this cottonwood and the tree now lies above it, the post fully visible.
I've walked by this dominant tree more than a thousand times in the past fifteen years and always marveled at the diameter of its central trunk, the height and spread of its canopy and the heavy massiveness of its limbs. I've noticed when its leaves begin to yellow and fall and when the first new leaves of spring arrive again.
For the last five years, the tree has been tilted strongly to the east with a halo of soil lifted around the roots. Almost unimaginable weight of the massive tree has been supported by the remaining roots, through winter ice storms, spring-summer near-tornadoes that knocked over smaller pecan and coffee trees on the other side of the Woods. Providing a life, a home, or a perch for woodpeckers, hawks, owls, squirrels, countless species of beetles and other insects.
Now the tree is down and has left a gaping hole in the forest, a light gap which will attract basking butterflies in the early spring and through the warm season. The gap will quickly fill with fast growing shoots of new trees taking their opportunity to reach for the light. The trunks of the old tree will last for a decade or more and serve as a home to longhorn and jewel beetles, weevils and fungus beetles, polypore fungi, tiny ants, agile basking robber flies and a whole community from the Woods.
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