Son of Basking Ridge Oak will be replanted at Presbyterian Church
The son of the famed Basking Ridge Oak will be headed home soon, replanted in the churchyard his father has shaded, blanketed with fallen leaves and littered with acorns for more than 600 years.
In one of those recent years - 2001 to be exact -- Tom Ombrello went to the church and scooped up a couple of hundred acorns from the big guy to nurture and grow a little guy to add to his collection.
Ombrello is a biologist and professor at Union County College in Cranford. There, off the winding road to the overflow parking lots at the back of the campus, is Ombrello's baby - The Historic Tree Project.
There are nearly 100 trees in all, the latest being an offspring of the American Elm from Oklahoma City, added in 2015. The parent tree sat outside the federal building that was bombed in 1995 and is the centerpiece of the memorial park today.
The first few in the collection were from George Washington's Mount Vernon estate -- an American Holly, Red Maple and Sweet Red Buckeye, which date back to when the first president walked among them.
In Ombrello's burgeoning forest of trees, owned by historic figures or silent witnesses to history, is son of the Basking Ridge Oak.
The white oak is a teenager, just 16 years old, but shows the same genetic propensity to spread its branches wide and parallel to the ground. Well, sort of.
"They all grow like that if they have the room," Ombrello said. "I doubt this one will ever grow to be the size of the original, though."
The young tree has room for now. It spreads out just a few branch-lengths away from the acorn offspring of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Hyde Park White Oak and the Mercer Oak, named for Gen. Hugh Mercer, who was mortally wounded near the tree during the Battle of Princeton.
Close by is the Washington Sycamore cultivated from the "helicopter" seeds that floated down from parent in Newark Military Park near where the general and his troops camped in 1775 during the Retreat Across New Jersey.
One of Ombrello's prized trees is a honey locust tree under which Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address. The parent tree was brought down in a 2008 storm, "so I'm glad we have a survivor," Ombrello said.
When Lincoln gave the famed speech, the Basking Ridge Oak was 22 score and seven years old. That's 447 years for those of you keeping score. Give or take.
"It's hard to tell its exact age," Ombrello said. "It doesn't really work like that. But it's at least 600 years old."
That means the tree was already in its middle age when Scotch-Irish farmers arrived in the Somerset Hills in the early 1700s and established the church in 1717.
When Ombrello started the tree project in the 1990s, he began "getting trees with national significance," he said.
The names attached to those trees run the gamut of American history and culture. Nathan Hale and John Paul Jones, Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King Jr., Charles Lindbergh and Sgt. Alvin York, Edgar Allen Poe and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Nine presidents. Helen Keller. Trees that survived Civil War battles at Manassas, Antietam and Gettysburg, and terror blasts at Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center.
But certain New Jersey trees were always on his list.
The Salem Oak, The Mercer Oak and the Basking Ridge were the acknowledged Top 3 -- Mercer because of its history, Salem and Basking Ridge because of their astounding longevity and massive size. For instance, the Basking Ridge tree's widest branch span is150 feet, making the tree 50 feet wider than it is high.
A quick aside: surviving the Colonial years for trees wasn't as easy as you'd think. Besides disease, termites and lightning strikes, wood was used in every structure, for furniture and to keep fires going 24/7. The Salem Oak and Basking Ridge Oak were on church property early on, which probably saved them from the saw mill.
The Basking Ridge tree has been ailing for decades, propped up by the church's efforts to keep it alive.
The trunk was bolstered by three tons of concrete 90 years ago, steel rods and cables have been used to support limbs that snake out from the 18-foot trunk over the church cemetery.
But by last summer, it was clear the tree was headed into the final winter of its years. The church made a hard decision, one they had staved off as long as possible.
The tree dismantling will begin in the coming days, and its trunk cut at ground level.
Knowing the death comes to even the hardiest living thing, Ombrello and the church agreed to harvest the acorns back in 2001.
"It was a banner year," Ombrello said. "They covered the ground like marbles - and it is my understanding that was the last time the tree ever produced like that. I went out with two buckets and scooped up as many as I could."
Back at his greenhouse on campus, he put the acorns to the water test.
"The ones that float, you throw away. The ones that sink you keep," he said.
Since the acorns sprout in late fall and then go dormant, Ombrello had to "simulate winter."
The seeds were kept in a refrigerator in planting flats until spring. A few weeks into spring, the sprouts were planted in greenhouse cups, where they grew into stalks, then replanted in the earth where they grew into saplings. A few years go by and before you know it, a tree takes shape.
In 2005, Ombrello gave the church 100 of the saplings to sell during a fundraiser to restore the cemetery beneath the giant tree, so the seeds of the original have been spread far and wide.
"The sentimental value of those saplings was head and shoulders above any money we raised," said Jon Klippel, the co-chair of the Basking Ridge Presbyterian Church Oak Tree Task Force. "I have one in my yard."
The money was significant, too, with some saplings selling for $50 and some for $100.
The tree Ombrello raised has grown to 20-feet, and now he will part with it. A few weeks ago, the college approved the donation of the teen oak to the church, where it will be the only descendant of the big tree on church grounds.
"Tom Ombrello has been magnificent through this whole process," Klippel said. "He has a genuine passion as a practitioner of his craft. I can't say enough about him."
After the father tree is dismantled and cut to a ground-level stump, the son will be brought in and replanted in a different part of the yard. The date is set for March 29, depending on the weather.
"It's going home," Ombrello said. "That's where it belongs."
Mark Di Ionno may be reached at mdiionno@starledger.com. Follow The Star-Ledger on Twitter @StarLedger and find us on Facebook.