'It's Like a Death in the Family'
Centuries-Old Flora's Oak in Barnesville Is Uprooted by Storm

By Philip Rucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 14, 2008

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.

"It was the ideal," Bennett said, "although Mother Nature doesn't care one way or another."

It is puzzling to ponder how nature struck Pepe's farm the afternoon of June 4. Thirty minutes after the howling wind and blinding rain passed the farm, Pepe hopped onto his John Deere Gator to survey the damage. That's when he saw Flora's Oak on her side, and yet the two Adirondack chairs at the tree's base had not moved.

"It was like going into the battlefield, the shock of seeing something you can't believe you're seeing," said Pepe, 74, a retired real estate agent who served in the Marine Corps.

"I was screaming, 'God, why? God, don't make it so.' But there it was," said Pepe, a New York native and the son of Italian immigrants.

"It's like a death in the family," lamented his wife, Linda, 63, who struggled to fight back tears.

The tree is named in the memory of Victor's younger sister, Flora, who died at 54 of pancreatic cancer and is buried a few yards across the field.

The Pepes visit their fallen tree with Buttercup, their cocker spaniel. For once, they can touch and explore the tree's branches, which always had been too high to reach.

"On her side, she creates a magical world," Linda Pepe said. "She invites you to explore all her branches. It's amazing."

They thought about the history this tree has lived, long before the Pepes bought the farm 17 years ago.

"This tree sheltered Native Americans; she sheltered Civil War soldiers," Linda Pepe said. "It's fascinating."

The day after the Wye Oak fell, thousands of pilgrims visited the tree in a public ritual that became a sort of state funeral. The tree's branches were sawed into pieces to mill several handcrafted prizes, most notably a 300-pound desk of swirling groves for the Maryland governor's office. Other pieces were made into gavels, dolls and church crosses.

But the Pepes do not wish the same fate upon their beloved Flora's Oak.

"She will never be touched," Victor Pepe said. "When your great-great-grandchildren are walking the Earth, she will be laying here peacefully, just as she fell.

"Just as God left her . . . for eternity."