giants

bartram was afraid people would think he was exaggerating his description of forests he passed through in east georgia in the 1770s --- the photograph here is of a chestnut tree somewhere along the little river in east tennessee in 1900, just before they cut it down

"Continuing some time through these shady groves, the scene opens, and discloses to view the most magnificent forest I had ever seen.  We rise gradually a sloping bank of twenty or thirty feet in elevation, and immediately entered this sublime forest; the ground is a perfectly level green plain, thinly planted by nature with the most stately forest trees, such as the gigantic black oak (Q. tinctoria) Liriodendron, Juglans nigra, Platanus, Juglans exalta, Fagus sylvatica, Ulmus sylvatica, Liquid-amber styraciflua, whose mighty trunks, seemingly of an equal heighth, appeared like superb columns…
 To keep within the bounds of truth and reality, in describing the magnitude and grandeur of these trees, would, I fear, fail of credibility; yet, I think I can assert, that many of the black oaks measured, eight, nine, ten, and eleven feet in diameter five feet above the ground, as we measured several that were above thirty feet girt, and from whence they ascend perfectly strait, with a gradual taper, forty or fifty feet to the limbs; but, below five or six feet, these trunks would measure a third more in circumference, on account of the projecting jambs, or supports, which are more or less, according to the number of horizontal roots, that they arise from: the Tulip tree, Liquidamber, and Beech, were equally stately."