My father, when walking a piece of land we were considering for a client, would always start by looking at the trees. Specifically, two trees: the pecans and the live oaks. He would tell you, often in advance of the soil report and almost always in advance of the surveyor, what kind of property we were standing on.
The pecans.
A mature pecan tree — eighty feet tall, with a trunk you cannot wrap your arms around — is, in this part of Texas, telling you about water. Pecans need a foot of rain a year minimum, and on hill country acreage that almost always means a water table within reasonable reach. A property with a pecan grove is a property that, almost without exception, has a productive well, year-round seasonal flow in the creeks, and good bottom-land soil.
The pecan also tells you about history. A grove that size was planted, almost always, between 1880 and 1940. Someone walked that land four generations ago and decided it was worth investing in. They were almost always right.
The live oaks.
Live oaks are different. A 200-year-old live oak — and there are still many in the corridor — is telling you about resilience. Live oaks survive drought, ice, oak wilt, and the occasional barbed-wire fence run through their trunks in the 1940s. A property with several mature live oaks is a property that has been protected, and protected for a long time. Someone, somewhere up the chain of title, made a decision not to clear-cut.
The live oak is also telling you about the lot itself. Their root systems are wide and shallow, and they will not tolerate poor drainage. A 200-year-old live oak on a piece of property is, almost by definition, on well-drained, properly-graded land.
“Trees this old are telling you that the land was, at some point, valued by someone who did not need to extract it.”
What we look for.
When we walk a property with a client, we are usually looking for both — the pecan grove that signals water and history, and the mature live oaks that signal long stewardship. A property with both is, in our experience, almost always a property worth taking seriously.
A property with neither is not necessarily a bad property. But it is a property without a story, and stories, in real estate as in life, tend to compound.
