The huge white oak, towering over the sycamores, poplars and dogwoods around it, is bent in the middle, like a spindly old man reaching for a drink of water.
The tree, known as the Wilmer Stone Oak and about 200 years old, did not always look like that. In 1988, burdened by its own weight, half of the tree's Y-shaped structure split from the trunk and crashed to the ground, ending forever the symmetrical beauty that had supported the huge crown under a robust pair of legs.
Even in its wounded state, though, the tree's physique remains magnificent, its 128-foot height undiminished by age or the elements. It is so grand that it will be dedicated today in Arnold as Maryland's state tree, a successor to the Wye Oak in Talbot County and Flora's Oak in Montgomery County, both felled in storms.
The ceremony in Arnold Park will be held around the base of the Wilmer Stone Oak, about 100 feet from a baseball field in a dense, usually undisturbed thicket of woodland. It is to be attended by Anne Arundel County officials, representatives of the Scenic Rivers and Magothy River land trusts, and other tree lovers.
"This is a great honor for the county to have a tree of this stature - no pun intended," John R. Leopold, the Anne Arundel County executive, said yesterday as he gazed up at the imposing trunk. "In England, they used to use trees like this to make masts for the navy's sailing ships."
As he finished his sentence, a silence of sorts resumed in the forest, broken only by the calls of ospreys, wrens, blue jays and cardinals. Deer and fox also populate the woods, darting among the black locust trees, wild grapevines and Virginia creeper.
"You half expect Jane Goodall and some gorillas to come running out of the woods," Leopold said. Next to him, Adam Smith, a county park ranger, leaned down to the ground near the mighty tree and touched the tiny leaves of a nascent oak, barely poking out of the musty earth.
"One day, it may replace that one," Smith said, pointing to the Wilmer Stone Oak, named after a former owner of the land on which the tree stands.
"I don't think we'll be around to see that," Leopold said.
Brian Knox, a member of the Anne Arundel County Forestry Board, said the tree, surrounded as it is by thick woods, "had to compete for sunlight its entire life," making its height all the more spectacular.
