So Many Acorns!

For the last 3 months oak trees have been pelting my trailer en masse. Acorns hitting an aluminum Airstream is very loud. Oak trees of North America produce more nuts than any other tree region worldwide, cultivated or wild. A single giant Oak tree can produce nearly ten thousand acorns in a reproductive season. Some years groups of oak trees produce huge numbers of seeds and in others almost none. There is a generally accepted theory for why these “mast years” happen. Naturalists believe that by producing, all at once, vast quantities of seeds that are eaten by many creatures, enough survives intact until the spring to form trees. According to the Boston Globe 2019 is definitely a mast year.

Despite my frustration with the acorns, I love the “Old Senator” the oldest resident of St. Augustine, the Live Oak tree, is 600 years old! It sits in the parking lot of the Howard Johnson hotel just a short distance from historic downtown St. Augustine. This magnificent oak tree stretches far above, making it one of the grandest and oldest trees in Florida.  An interesting factoid: The name live oak comes from the fact that evergreen oaks remain green and “live” throughout winter, when other oaks are dormant and leafless.