Seiders Oaks
Skimming an article about the writing process, I made a screen shot of the following quote:
“Self doubt can be an ally. This is because it serves as an indicator of aspiration. It reflects love, love of something we dream of doing, and desire, desire to do it. If you find yourself asking yourself and your friends: “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?” chances are you are.””
What are the chances that my friend in Austin had this paperback and gifted it to me?
After pushing myself (along with a bundle of self doubt) out to Fort Worth to find the Turner Oak and Traders Oaks, I felt ready to tackle the task of finding another group from the Famous Trees of Texas. Because Austin has a cluster of trees and I have friends in the area, it was the obvious next stop on my adventure.
By this time, I had found the Famous Trees of Texas website, which revealed one of the mysteries I initially imagined discovering one at a time: which trees are still alive? The somewhat dated looking site has the full list of the original trees in the 1st edition with little tombstone icons beside all of the trees that are dead, plus all of the trees that have been designated "famous" in the subsequent editions.
You can look up trees by name, species, historical period or topic. There is also a Texas county map, which you can click and find trees by location, which I used to make my working list for Austin.
My dear friend Rachel, who joined me on my 2015 trek to Peckerwood Gardens, was available to help me locate trees. We met for lunch at the oldest of the small Austin chain called Kerby Lane, since it was near one of the first stops. There's something about having an accomplice along which helps me let go of the exhausting questions that spiral in my mind…
Why am I doing this?
Who wants to read about old trees?
Am I a writer?
Shouldn't I have more expertise in trees to do something like this?
The Seider's Oaks are in a park named after them that is as pleasant as the book promises. Walking the paved paths to the center of the small green space, we easily located the group of four oaks. The book photo depicts a wilder looking space. This is most definitely an urban park, so it's easy to see that a lot has changed in almost 50 years.
A number of these trees represent the beginnings of civilization as we know it, but this came at a cost to those already here living off the land.
Gideon White was one of the first settlers to move his family to the area that became Austin just after construction of the capital city began. A nearby spring on Shoal Creek seemed a good spot to build a log cabin, but a few years later he was attacked and killed by Indians. The historical marker calls it a massacre. The book claims that the marks of a number of arrows and bullets which hit the one of the trees were visible for many years.
Though familiar from general culture, was my first encounter with the obvious bias presented in this book that I thought was just about trees. Discomfort arose from my complete lack of understanding of history, one sided or otherwise.
At least one of his daughters, Louisa Marie, survived and later married Edward Seiders, who ran a grocery and livery business. As Austin grew, they remained among its residents and by the 1870s, Seiders Springs, as it became known, was a recreation spot with bath houses and a dance pavilion.
The trees created lovely shadows all around. One leans over so far as to be nearly horizontal, with some weedy brush growing through what would be the upper canopy sprawled on the ground. Loads of little air plant bundles clung to the limbs, something I rarely see around the Dallas area. They are the epiphytic Tillandsia recurvata, commonly called ball moss.
Without trying, I got a decent shot of the middle tree at a similar angle to the photo in the book, which provides a satisfying puzzle-fit kind of feeling when you see the two images side by side.
There is no denying the power of shade on a hot day in Texas. By late October, you might expect cooler weather, but in these parts, it's not all that unusual to hit 90 degrees, which it did that day. After surviving intense high temperatures the entire summer, the day felt more or less tolerable. We only saw one or two others walking the park and the whole area was quiet and peaceful. As the first stop in a day of tree visits, I was uncertain how long each one might take to locate, so we took our obligatory tree hugger pix and set out to find the Battle Oaks.
