Centennial celebrates patriarch trees.

Stately old pioneers with roots firmly entrenched in centennial soil will be honored when the state of Oklahoma celebrates its 100th birthday in 2007.

The Witness Tree Project, sponsored by state foresters and the Tree Bank Foundation, hopes to ID woodland patriarchs growing when Oklahoma became a state in 1907, along with those planted by an influx of land-run pioneers.

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Among the honorees is a broad-canopied bur oak along the banks of the North Canadian River in Oklahoma City. According to core samples it is more than 200 years old and was therefore a witness to Indian encampments, the region's early cattle drive era, and eventually the birth of the state capital city.

"Just think what that tree has seen," marveled David Yost, a member of the Tree Bank's board of directors. Yost points out the oak will eventually shade a Native American Cultural Center planned for the banks of the North Canadian.

Although often stereotyped as a treeless prairie state, Oklahoma contains a diverse forest environment ranging from mountainous mixed hardwoods and pine in the southeast to pinion-juniper plateaus in the northwest corner of the panhandle. Commercial logging remains an economic staple in southeast counties, where oxbow lakes harbor alligators. Mountain lions are more at home in the arid northwest, where ponderosa pines reach their eastern limit.

Oklahoma's state champion baldcy-press resides in the southeast's McCurtain County. At more than 1,000 years old, it is still dwarfed by a cypress more than 2,000 years old killed by lightning several years ago.

The Cross Timbers, a thickly timbered forest belt pushing north from Texas across Oklahoma and into Kansas, contains gnarled post oaks, blackjack oaks, and eastern redcedars more than 400 years old. And the state once harbored three national champion trees, although all three eventually literally lost their crowns.

Oklahoma Urban Forestry Coordinator Mark Bays says that trees deserve special recognition for the role they've played in the region's social and cultural development. He points out studies show trees have a calming effect on neighborhoods, resulting in reduced crime.

Among Oklahoma's favorite witness trees is the Council Oak, protected in a small park near downtown Tulsa. This spreading post oak overlooks the Arkansas River and was a mature tree in 1836 when Creek Indians stopped here at the end of their forced removal on the Trail of Tears from ancestral homelands in Alabama.

According to the Tulsa Preservation Commission, the area around the oak was chosen as a "busk ground" by the Lochapoka clan at the end of their exodus. A busk is a ritual featuring ceremonial cleansing, fasting, and purification, a time when grievances are resolved, special meals are served, and then ceremonial embers are distributed to rekindle hearths throughout scattered villages.

Suffering from exhaustion, ill health, and the loss of 161 kinsmen from among the 630 clan members forced to accept a military eviction from Alabama, the Tulsa-Lochapoka Creeks deposited ashes carried from their final homeland fires and redistributed them around the Council Oak, thus establishing a new town in an alien territory.

The oak has symbolized the plight of the Creeks for nearly 150 years and will be replaced by a seedling grown from the tree's acorns when it dies. For now, however, it remains a silent witness to the turbulent history of a state that's still not much more than a sapling, especially if measured in arboreal time.