| National Champion
| White Oak Quercus alba Beech Family — Oak Genus Wye Mills State Park, Maryland Circumference = 382 inches (31.1 feet)
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| Dr. Fran Gouin
Professor Emeritus Horticulture University of Maryland 
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This National Champion White Oak—known as "The Wye Oak"—is one of five giant trees that have remained on the National Register of Big Trees since the 1940's. To learn more about this remarkable ancient tree, visit:
The Quiet Giant, The Wye Oak
Identification
& CultureThe White Oak, also called Stave Oak, is the classic member of the Oak family—its most common and important member, contributing three quarters of the wood sold as oak. The White Oak is the most important hardwood tree native to North America, and grows widely throughout the eastern U.S. This sturdy tree has wide-spreading branches a rounded crown, and a trunk irregularly divided into spreading, often horizontal, stout branches.
White Oak wood is one of our best high-quality hardwoods, and is used for innumerable purposes, including furniture, flooring, interior finishing, tool handles, barrel staves, railroad ties, and fuel.
The White Oak acorns are an important source of food for wildlife, particularly the gray squirrel, which plants many of them, thus assuring future oak forests. Diminishing squirrel populations means fewer white oaks in the future.
In colonial times, the White Oak's first place use was for shipbuilding, then for charcoal. Its bark was used for tanning, made into a tea to treat tonsilitis. Native Americans and colonists also ate the acorns, making them palatable by boiling them in water. The Russian Orthodox Church uses White Oak in their Christmas celebration by swinging branches with burning leaves into the sky as a reminder of the star the three wise men followed.
In 2001, Dr. Frank Gouin, retired professor of horticulture from University of Maryland and nationally reknowned expert on horticulture, devised a new method of bud grafting and attempted to clone the Wye Oak. Several other efforts to propagate this ancient oak had failed. Dr. Gouin attempted to graft 100 budwood cuttings, and met success with a remarkable 97 of them.