Michigan has new champion American basswood, eastern cottonwood and sugar maple trees.
Thanks to two programs that hunt for and catalog the state’s biggest trees, these specimens – which are potentially hundreds of years old – are now known to the public.
The new champions include a giant sugar maple that stands in the middle of farming fields in Lapeer County, an impressive American basswood next to a driveway in Calhoun County and a huge eastern cottonwood near a road in Isabella County.
All three trees were submitted to ReLeaf Michigan’s 16th biennial Big Tree Hunt contest. Two of them were submitted to the Michigan Big Tree Register, which tracks the state’s largest trees, at the same time as the contest. ReLeaf submitted the third champion along with more than a dozen other potential champions and big trees discovered through the contest; four others were added to the register as notably large trees for their species…