Big Tree Park and the 2,000-Year-Old Neighbour Who Outlived The Senator
The Senator, a roughly 3,500-year-old cypress, was lost to fire in 2012. Its companion Lady Liberty, about 2,000 years old, still stands at the end of Big Tree Park's boardwalk in Longwood — along with The Senator's clone, The Phoenix.
3 minute read
The oldest resident of Longwood is not a person, and she has been standing in the same swamp since roughly the Roman Empire. Lady Liberty, a bald cypress Seminole County estimates at about 2,000 years old, rises at the end of the boardwalk in Big Tree Park, a county park at 761 General Hutchinson Parkway set inside the Spring Hammock Preserve. She is not even the tree the park is famous for. That honour belongs to her neighbour — and his story is why a small county park carries the emotional weight of a memorial.
The Senator
For generations, travellers came to this hammock to stand under The Senator, a bald cypress the county estimated at about 3,500 years old — among the oldest trees on earth, and a landmark long before Florida had tourists. The land around it was donated to Seminole County by State Senator M.O. Overstreet, the tree’s namesake, and the park was dedicated in 1929 during a visit by President Calvin Coolidge. The Senator stood about 125 feet tall when, on January 16, 2012, it was lost to fire — an arson that made national news and left a charred absence at the centre of the hammock.
The county’s response is the park you visit now. A renovated boardwalk with interpretive signage leads through the hydric hammock to the Senator’s former site, where a memorial marks the spot. Near the playground grows The Phoenix — a genetic clone of The Senator, planted so the tree’s own DNA carries its story forward. It is a quietly moving piece of park design: grief, botany and hope in one short walk.
Lady Liberty Steps Forward
Continue past the Senator’s site and the boardwalk reaches Lady Liberty, standing some 40 feet from where her companion grew. She was only directly viewable from 2005, when she received her name and the boardwalk was extended to her; after the fire, the county fenced and protected her as the park’s last remaining giant. At roughly 2,000 years old she is more than a millennium younger than The Senator was — a sentence that tells you everything about the timescale this hammock works on. Bring a wide-angle lens and patience: at some 90 feet tall behind her fence, she does not fit in a frame so much as fill a sky.
Inside Spring Hammock
Big Tree Park is the front door to something much larger: the Spring Hammock Preserve, roughly 1,500 acres of mixed hardwood hammock and pine flatwoods that form one of the biggest surviving natural areas in Seminole County’s urban core. The boardwalk is the preserve in miniature — a shaded passage through a hydric hammock where cypress knees push through dark water, ferns crowd the rails and the temperature drops a few degrees the moment you step under the canopy. Interpretive signs along the route do quiet, useful work, explaining how a bald cypress swamp filters water, shelters wildlife and survives fire cycles that would clear lesser forests. Visitors who come only for the famous trees often leave talking about the hammock itself: fifteen minutes from a State Road 434 traffic light, the city simply stops, and a landscape older than Florida’s human history takes over. That contrast — suburb at the gate, deep time inside — is the park’s real exhibit.
The Rest of the Park
Big Tree Park doubles as a trailhead for the Cross Seminole Trail, the 23-mile paved route running from the Winter Park side of the county north toward the Wekiva corridor, which makes the park an easy cycle-in stop. A playground, picnic spots and restrooms round out a visit that takes under an hour unless the hammock slows you down — which, in the green hush off the boardwalk, it tends to. The park opens daily in the morning and closes at dusk, county-park fashion.
Pair Big Tree with a paddle at Wekiva Island and you have Seminole County’s two great nature rooms in a single day. Both are pinned on our Orlando Top Spots Map. Cities keep their history in buildings, and Longwood’s historic district does that well. Big Tree Park keeps it in a living thing — older than the town, the county and the state combined.
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