By Tim Norris
Down from among the tall pines of Maine in 1980, David Bunting found a small, flowering tree arching over the driveway of his new home on Hypoluxo Island. He liked it well enough — “I’ve always liked trees,” he says — and then it grew on him.
It was, he knew, an orange geiger, Cordia sebestena, a kind he had seen in the Bahamas. This one showed a lot of personality, its limbs thrusting south like the side-swept hairdo of a bygone movie star, and it would shower the drive with summer flowers and work its way into local legend.
It fills the southern side of his U-shaped driveway, but he would never cut it back.
Now the tree is a national champion. Walter Scott, a forester writing in American Forests magazine in September 1940, campaigned for a National Register of Big Trees, tended these days by the nonprofit American Forests, watched by arborists everywhere and overseen in this state by Charlie Marcus of the Florida Forest Service.
Anyone looking in print or online can find the Hypoluxo reference, between an anachuita in Texas and a dogwood in New Jersey: “Geiger tree, height 19 feet, circumference (trunk) 39 inches, crown spread 22 feet.”
An owner, Bunting says, can take pride in the listing. A tree can shade and decorate, cheer and console. It can become part of a household.
As Mark Torok, senior forester in the Florida Division of Forestry, says, “People like big trees. A tree is a living creature, some of them ancient, and they grow in their own ways. There’s a gumbo limbo in Homestead, second biggest in the state, that looks like a sea serpent.”
Torok showed up in Bunting’s driveway awhile back to measure the geiger, using a hypsometer to triangulate height and crown spread and to declare, at the time, “You’re No. 2.” No. 1 lived, then, on Sanibel Island.
When that tree gave up the ghost, Bunting’s geiger ascended into the pantheon of Big Trees, joining the likes of a pond cypress in Longwood, the state’s biggest tree at 125 feet up and 17½ feet around and nicknamed the Senator; and General Sherman, a California sequoia more than 2,300 years old and considered by some, at 275 feet high and 1,910 tons, the largest living thing on Earth (if you don’t count root-linked and genetically identical aspens in Colorado and a gargantuan fungus, mostly underground, in Oregon).
In Bunting‘s yard, the orange geiger is half-entwined with a flowering frangipani and rivaled in height by a slim and sturdy Lignum vitae that Bunting planted with his own hands and by a massive and outreaching live oak, which, on this mid-fall morning, is giving two squirrels a view of the owner’s tree tour. The geiger has kept a few of its flowers, and its leaves, ovate and pinnate and rough to the touch, look abundantly green.
“This is a hardwood, and they grow very slowly,” Bunting is saying. “Wait’ll you see it when all the orange flowers are out. It’s beautiful. I didn’t want people driving in the driveway, so I let the limbs keep on a-growin’.”
He proves a first-rate guide. Bunting taught science in Lake Worth Middle School and in Delray Beach and West Palm and Miami, and he still volunteers at Boca’s Gumbo Limbo Nature Center.
Home has been his harbor, and the orange geiger is one of its anchors.
He also appreciates how his trees live and share. The squirrels love the live oak because it showers them in acorns. The orange geiger, for its flowers, is the preferred perch of another, rarer, more colorful life form: hummingbirds. Bunting wishes they would find this one. “I’ve only seen one hummingbird in all the years I’ve been here,” he says. This geiger is not, apparently, on the hummingbird’s migratory flight plan.
It is, though, on the National Register of Big Trees and likely to stay there, for a good many years. If he sells the house, Bunting says, the buyer must promise to preserve and protect the tree.
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