The Oak of Laukiai is a 400-year-old common oak in the Lithuanian village of Rukai. Its leaves turn to amber in the fall, a towering golden landmark on the rural landscape as it prepares for another Baltic winter.
There are tens of thousands of majestic trees gracing the planet, many of them older and more magnificent than this one. But it was the Oak of Laukiai that was named the 2026 European Tree of the Year at a recent ceremony in Brussels.
The 2026 grand prize winner was nominated by the Laukiai people in Lithuania, who celebrated its four centuries of strength, endurance, and cultural significance and won the admiration and votes of people throughout Europe. Contest organizers agreed that the Oak of Laukiai is a stunning specimen, but they stressed they are “not looking for the most beautiful tree, but for a tree with a story, a tree rooted in the lives and work of the people and the community that surrounds it.”
All of which got us to thinking – why not a Tree of the Year on St. Simons? After all, the island’s moss-draped live oaks, towering pines, and windswept cedars are what come to mind first when people think of St. Simons.
And so, a tree with a story.
One rooted in the lives of the people who have loved it, the generations who have nurtured it, and the community that has passed it daily for more than three hundred years.
St. Simons Island’s Inaugural Tree of the Year, then, is Old Ironsides, a live oak that scores of you supported in 2024 when the Land Trust purchased a half-acre of land on Frederica Road where the tree has lived for three-plus centuries.
The acquisition was made possible in part by a bequest from the Steve and Miranda Hires’ estate, from contributions from the Land Trust’s Pennies for Preservation voluntary giving program, and from a $25,000 challenge grant from Golden Isles Fund for Trees (GIFT). When the GIFT challenge was announced, the Land Trust received enormous positive feedback and inspired the community to contribute more than $75,000 (including the GIFT match) to help protect Old Ironsides.
But long before that campaign, Old Ironsides and the six other large live oak trees at 2404 Frederica Road created a sanctuary for the Leavy family who moved to the property in 1968. It’s where the three Leavy children – Jan, Buff, and Vance – grew up and where, years later Jan Leavy Bone purchased the family home and raised her own children between 2004 and 2024.
It was Jan who registered “Old Ironsides” with the Louisiana Garden Club, Inc., an organization that keeps count of the nation’s oldest and most historic live oak trees. “They had a name picked out,” Jan says of the Louisiana Garden Club, but they let her make the final decision after checking in with her mother, “who was a pretty big historian. She thought Old Ironsides was perfect” because of the nickname of the USS Constitution, whose hull was made from live oak trees felled on St. Simons Island and that saved the ship from being destroyed by enemy fire in the War of 1812.
“A tree this beautiful deserves to be shared with everyone!”
— Jan Leavy Bone
“We climbed all those trees,” says Jan, who now lives in Augusta. But it was her brother “Buff and his friends who were the biggest climbers.”
A gymnast in high school, Buff remembers that he and a good friend hung rings, cables, and straps “on a high tree limb that was much closer to the official height of where rings should hang” than the gym where they practiced in Brunswick. “We made mats and could do dismounts as well as handstands hanging from Old Ironsides.”
Jan and Buff’s brother Vance recalls that the tree “provided the perfect backdrop for oyster roasts during oyster season as my friends and I would gather around an open fire.” Vance, who splits his time between St. Simons and Athens, visited the island recently, “while driving by our former family homestead, a sense of pride and gratitude came over me,” he said. “How amazing that the partnership of the developer, the Land Trust and the generosity of donors preserved virtually all of this unique property on St. Simons Island. Old Ironsides isn’t the only amazing live oak tree at 2404 Frederica Road, which is why I’m so grateful and appreciative that all of those other beauties were also preserved so generations to come can also enjoy the amazing canopy that my family did for around seven decades!”
Sister Jan concurs. “It was fabulous that all the oaks were saved. So special, so very, very special. Seeing the park makes me very happy.”
All agree, though, that it’s Old Ironsides — strong as a battleship and tough enough to withstand cannon fire and generations of kids climbing and swinging from rings twenty feet up in the air – that is worthy of being St. Simons Island’s 2026 Tree of the Year.
The Land Trust looks forward to involving the entire community in the future as we nominate and name an award-winning tree during National Arbor Day on the last Friday of April every year. We hope that school-aged children, gardening groups, and others will join us annually in selecting a Land Trust tree that has a unique story and is rooted in the lives of the people who have loved it.
For now, though, let’s honor Old Ironsides, and thank the Leavy family and all the others who have nurtured it through the years.