Excerpt from The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue by Mike Tidwell, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The old oak produced a million acorns in her life, at least. Her own existence began with a single acorn in the 1870s, likely buried by a blue jay or a squirrel and forgotten. And when she died, one arborist estimated five hundred different life-forms had inhabited her massive crown, from ravens to rat snakes to cicadas to tiny aphids to a patchwork of moss and lichen.

For more than a century, storms and droughts came and went on the 7100 block of Willow Avenue in Takoma Park, Maryland. New houses were built, others burned down. And this southern red oak (Quercus falcata) was always there, the emerging giant just behind the backyard porch of what eventually became the Miller property. Children climbed on her branches for generations. Birds made nests. There were lightning strikes.

Before so much changed on this block—before the shocking rain of 2018 and all that followed—I remember walking home on hot summer days from the DC subway. I'd walk past broiling urban parking lots and shade-free DC storefronts until I reached Willow Avenue, the Maryland border, and there was the Miller Tree.

By herself, she shaded a vast portion of the block, a sentry at the edge of a magnificent urban-suburban forest covering much of Takoma Park. A drop in temperature of nearly ten degrees came with her shadow. That shadow poured down from the sixty-foot-tall trunk and a canopy of fully leafed branches.

Those branches stretched languorously to the southwest, nearly touching a giant walnut tree bordering the back lawn of the Pande-Gordy house. To the northeast, the Miller Tree stretched to within conversation distance of a big white oak at the Kurtz-Greenberger house. Those neighboring trees, in turn, reached toward others—and so on throughout much of this municipality of eighteen thousand people. Over its history, so obsessed has the city of Takoma Park been with planting and caring for trees that a big share of its streets are named for them: Maple, Holly, Tulip, Cedar, Dogwood, Birch, Willow—all avenues.

But the big oaks dominate here and are highly valued—and no wonder. People describe a sense of well-being, a shift in mood when standing under big trees, including oaks. It's not an illusion. Studies show a person's blood pressure typically drops while "forest bathing." Just seeing a tree through a window can help patients recover faster from sickness. Your immune system improves. Whatever worries or ails you, you feel better near a big tree.

Lisa and Dave Miller bought the house at 7120 Willow Avenue in the autumn of 2010. Eager to start a family, they obsessed over the handsome oak out back, feeling her giant spirit hover protectively over the entire backyard. Dave, the family grill chef, envisioned an outdoor smoker for brisket and beer-can chicken. Lisa came from a family of hunters and fishermen. Her grandfather had owned a charter fishing boat on the Chesapeake Bay. She craved the outdoors and all its natural treasures.

Those treasures, of course, were originally home to a far different people in this region: the Anacostan people of the Piscataway tribe. They lived on migratory shad from the nearby Potomac River and—in lean years—a flour made from dried oak acorns. By the mid-1600s, that world was already slipping away, lost to the axes and guns of invading European settlers.

For the next two centuries, the area that is today Takoma Park was timbered and tilled by scattered farmers. Then in the 1880s and '90s, Willow Avenue and surrounding streets were mapped out as a trolley suburb of Washington, DC. In 1905, the Miller house was constructed with newly modern efficiency, the precut and sorted materials arriving by mule wagon from the nearby Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

In 2010 when the Millers moved in, the giant red oak in the backyard was—astonishingly—in near-perfect condition. Unlike most trees her age, she was not shedding many branches, large or small, to the ground below. She survived the massive derecho storm of 2012—a line of thunderstorms on steroids that took out many younger trees in this town. When the Millers' son, Wesley, was born in 2013, they put his crib on the second floor, in the corner room closest to the tree's massive girth, the ultimate parental vote of confidence. That confidence lasted five more years.

Excerpted from The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue by Mike Tidwell. Copyright © 2025 by Mike Tidwell. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.