Angel oak | The fairytale tree | Over 1,500 years-old tree

Angel Oak is one of the oldest organisms east of the Mississippi, believed to be over 1,500 years-old.


Before you start with the “It’s photoshoped” comments, check Wikipedia and you’ll see it’s very real. Angel Oak is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Charlestone, South Carolina. It has a height of 20 meters, measures 2.7 meters in diameter and it’s crown shades an area of 1,600 square meters. It’s longest limb stretches out 27 meters.


Its name comes from the Angel estate, but local legends say ghosts of former slaves sometimes appear around the tree, as angels.


Angel Oak has survived countless earthquakes and floods, as well as human interference. It was damaged by Hurricane Hugo, in 1989, but has since then recovered.

The 200yr old champion Lucombe oak tree | Oldest and largest trees in Devon

The 250-year-old Lucombe oak, in Exmouth, Devon, was the biggest of its kind in the world with a girth of 26 feet.

It was one of Devon's oldest trees and the centrepiece of Phear Park, Exmouth, which is itself only 100 years old this summer.

The great oak which had been attacked by a fungus for years toppled over on Sunday night despite only light winds blowing.

It had been failing for some time and is thought to have died as a result of its age.

The trunk snapped off with most of the roots left in the ground, where a huge hole opened up.

The so-called 'Champion oak' was donated to the people of Exmouth by the Phear family after the Second World War.

While its exact age is not known, since the first Lucombe oak was grown by William Lucombe in the 1760s, it could be up to 250 years old.

East Devon District Council gardeners now have the task of deciding what to do with the trunk.

Steve Gazzard, 60, who was born and brought up in Exmouth and climbed the tree as a youngster with his brother Martin, said: "It is a terrible blow.

"She really was an old faithful and we were all looking forward to the coming weeks when she would have looked her best, surrounded by a host of daffodils.

"I have seen her grow in the past 60 years. Bicton College collected some seeds from her a few years ago and I am hoping that perhaps offspring could be planted in the park to keep the family going.

"We will need a mature tree planted thereabouts as a replacement and I think it would be a good idea if we could keep the fallen trunk as some kind of climbing frame for the young people."

Top 5 Most Amazing Tree Houses

5. This amazing treehouse above was designed by Takashi Kobayashi, one of japan’s leading treehouse creators. This house was designed after an advertising agency in Tokyo, hired him to design a treehouse for a Nescafé commercial now running on Japanese television. Mr. Kobayashi built an oval bird’s nest of a house, 12 feet high and 9 feet in diameter, reached by a circular staircase, and the final price for this tree house was about $38,000. The house is located on a field there owned by the town of Kamishihoro, where it remains an enticing, if off-limits, gift from Nestlé, the makers of Nescafé, to the people of Hokkaido.


4. Three MIT designers - Mitchell Joachim, Lara Greden and Javier Arbona - created this living treehouse in which the dwelling itself merges with its environment and nourishes its inhabitants. This home concept is intended to replace the outdated design solutions at Habitat for Humanity. Until now this house is just a concept, an a really cool one. Despite its odd exterior, the house will look normal on the inside. The walls, packed with clay and plastered over, will keep out the rain, and modern technology will be welcome.


3. Sybarite is one of the most exciting architectual practices in London. The conceptual treehouse pictured above is one of the projects from UK-based Sybarite design. This treehouse is a modular system which capitalises on the beauty of its setting whilst minimising its impact upon it. The layout, along with panoramic windows, maximise benefit of the sun path, orientated so the kitchen enjoys morning light whilst the living and bedroom spaces have the pleasure of the sunset and twilight. The flexible form, comprised of modular prefabricated sections, enables configurations ranging from one to five bedrooms. The company’s site reports, “The prefabricated design can be installed on site within two weeks and is extremely lightweight, uses many recycled products, is part self-sustainable and low on maintenance.”


2. The 4TreeHouse was designed by Lukasz Kos a masters student at the University of Toronto’s School of Architecture & Design. Posing as a Japanese lantern on stilts, Kos’ creation floats within the fir trees on Lake Muskoka, Ontario, an elegant slatted structure that scales the trees and lets light radiate down it’s core.


1. These incredible looking tree houses are called ‘Free Spirit Spheres’ and are designed by Tom Chudleigh, and is an eco-friendly living quarter that was created to co-exist unobtrusively with its forest environment. Wooden spheres are built much like a cedar strip canoe or kayak, suspension points are similar to the chain plate attachments on a sailboat and the stairways hang from a tree much like a sailboats shrouds hang from the mast.

Tree with an ear

A tourist has a photo taken besides a cypress, on July 24, which bears a scar closely resembling a human ear in shape.The cypress, at least 900 years old, stands in front of the Taihao Mausoleum of Huaiyang county, central China’s Henan province.