'It's Like a Death in the Family'

Centuries-Old Flora's Oak in Barnesville Is Uprooted by Storm

The magnificent white oak rested on her side like a toppled statue, her mangled base of roots, dirt and rock reaching nearly three stories into the sky. Her thick branches formed a dizzying maze in the grass.

And still, her leaves were green.

But her lively color provided little comfort to her solemn caretakers. Flora's Oak was Maryland's state tree designee and anointed successor to a beloved oak that fell in a storm in 2002. Then, last week, the centuries-old Flora's Oak in Montgomery County herself succumbed to a violent thunderstorm.

Flora's Oak is dead.

"After 200 to 400 years undisturbed, there she is, upside down," Victor Pepe said this week as he visited the uprooted tree on his 150-acre farm in Barnesville. "In five minutes, the Almighty blew the whole place to smithereens."

"I must tell you," he said. "I'm having a hard time about the loss. She's such a treasure. . . . It's like losing John Fitzgerald Kennedy all over again."

The fall of Flora's Oak is a nightmarish deja vu for those who catalogue giant trees. Six years ago, nearly to the day, the Wye Oak, Maryland's state tree that at 460 years old was the anointed granddaddy of the nation's white oaks, was felled in a powerful thunderstorm.

After the Wye Oak died in the Eastern Shore town of Wye Mills, state foresters searched for the next-biggest white oak. They found Flora's Oak, which stands 107 feet tall, with a trunk circumference of 22.3 feet and a crown spread of 115 feet.

Foresters determined Flora's Oak was the largest in Maryland, and the General Assembly was to name it the official state tree. Someday, they thought, Flora's Oak would outgrow the national champion white oak, in Southwest Virginia.

But it was not to be.

"We don't have anything else in Maryland that has that potential," said John Bennett, volunteer director of the Maryland Big Tree Program.

Flora's Oak's symmetry gave it blue-ribbon status, Bennett said. The tree had a graceful arch, forming a symmetrical silhouette with its branches and leaves spread the same length as the tree was tall.