Bur Oak: Giants and Legends
“This ramble traces the history of the bur oak — its evolution after the asteroid, its role in Manitoba’s oak savanna, its decline under settlement, and why planting one today is an act of hope.”
📚 Estimated Read Time: 10–12 minutes
Childhood Under the Giants
The treetops swayed in the summer breeze, the leaves rustled, and the branches groaned as the wind pushed through. The squirrels were chattering and the woodpeckers kept the beat as we ran through the forest.
The trees were big and we were just little kids, and being small made all things big. The woods went on and on, and we ran and climbed until the sun came down and the sky shifted into its orange evening hues. We found our way back home and did it all over again the next day.
As a kid living in the 70s and 80s, we moved to North Kildonan in Winnipeg. It was a new development then, not far from the Red River and close to Bunn’s Creek. Not many houses were there yet — ours was among the first built. I was young, and I saw the world around me as my playground, my adventure, my own hundred‑acre wood.
The trees were huge, girthy giants with canopies that shaded the soil on hot summer days. The forest floor had ferns and dogwoods and leaf fall from past seasons so thick it felt like a carpet over the soil. These were the giant old‑growth bur oaks of Manitoba — kings of the Red River Valley. The survivors from the old bur oak savanna, still standing exactly where the acorns fell.
My friends and I built forts and climbed these trees. I watched squirrels, hawks, and owls live in the branches. Deer wandered through like ghosts. It was a great time to be a kid and see this world still standing.
At home, the developer had raised the land three feet around the house to prevent flooding, but they left the oaks. My dad started digging the soil back down to the original forest floor around each tree. I didn’t understand why at the time — I just knew he cared about them, Dad said they would suffocate if left as they were. They were a young stand of bur oaks, and a few older giants stood in the yard too.
After he dug them out, he rolled sod over the mud, and the trees were fine. Dad told me they were hundreds of years old and that we needed to save them. He said, “Once they’re gone, they’re gone. I can’t plant new ones if they die.” He meant the value in these trees was time — and time can’t be replaced. It has to be preserved.
That stuck with me. A tree that might be 300 years old was standing in our yard. Even as a kid, I felt the weight of that. These trees had witnessed a tremendous amount of history, and that day they were witnessing Dad and me. From then on, I had a deep respect for the big trees, especially the bur oak.
But this was a new development, and development was coming. It was 1979. We lived there until 1986, and in those seven years I watched almost all the oaks get cut and hauled away. Some were left in yards, but the land was raised around them, and people didn’t know — like my dad did — to dig back down to the forest floor so the trees wouldn’t suffocate. They didn’t understand why the oaks died.
I did.
It was a tragedy to watch trees hundreds of years old disappear in a few short years. Firewood. Landfill. Gone. When we moved away, the forest was gone too — replaced with houses, lawns, and young poplars and maples. Twigs compared to the giants that once stood there.
The Oak’s Story Begins Long Before Mine
My part of this story is at the end. To understand the beginning, we have to go back to when oaks were evolving and the world was regrowing.
Bur oak began its story in the ashes of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. Its ancestors survived fire, darkness, and extinction. Over millions of years they evolved into the prairie oak — the tree that followed the melting ice north and took root in Manitoba. The oaks here are living descendants of a lineage older than the prairie itself.
They arrived along riverbanks and tributaries, along lakes and the edges of marshlands. If there was water, the oaks came. They grew in rich soil, gravel, sand, and rocky granite outcrops. All these trees need is water and time — and they had both.
I’ve walked under trees that grew from sand dunes at Victoria Beach, along granite outcrops in the Whiteshell, and in the gravel lands of St. Malo. These trees all thrive with time and water. That’s all they need.
Bur oak is the northernmost oak in North America. In Canada, its stronghold is Manitoba: the Red and Assiniboine River valleys, the shores of Lake Winnipeg, the southeastern corner of the province, and Riding Mountain.
These trees support squirrels, deer, wolves, bison, and bears — and many animals that have since gone extinct. They supported early humans when they first arrived thousands of years ago. These trees witnessed a world from the asteroid to this very day.
The Old‑Growth Savanna
The snow had melted and the land was dry. Under the oaks along the river, the leaves had not yet come out, but smoke was in the air, rising off the tall‑grass prairie. A wall of smoke rose in the distance, and soon the flames came. But the giant oaks waited as they always do — through floods and winters and drought. To them, this fire was just another Tuesday.
When it came, it rolled with the wind in a roar of fury, but the grass burns fast and often. It scorches the earth, killing shrubs and small trees like maples and ash, but the oaks — big and small — go on, their thick bark barely singed. The forest floor was scorched black, and the oaks hardly noticed. The squirrels and raccoons took refuge in the high branches and waited out the fire.
A week later, the land turned green again.
Imagine stepping into a world that isn’t forest and isn’t prairie — but something in between. A place built by fire, wind, drought, and time. A place where the sky is as much a part of the ecosystem as the soil.
Bur oaks stood far apart, with wide crowns and tall grass growing below. They are the most fire‑resistant oak there is, and they needed to be. On tall‑grass prairie, when the fires came, their thick bark saved them. Poplars and maples didn’t make it. The oaks evolved to thrive where fire made it impossible for other trees to survive.
Their acorns fed ecosystems — jays and squirrels, deer and bear, and eventually people. Their roots dug deep, surviving fire, drought, icy winters, and spring floods. This tree shaped Manitoba’s waterways and ecosystems like no other species could. It allowed life here to thrive.
The World Changes
Then the world changed as settlers invaded the savanna.
Imagine being a settler in the Red River Valley. You take a boat across an ocean to Hudson Bay. You and your four bags are loaded into a York boat, and you start paddling down the waterways toward the Red River Valley. It’s a nine‑hour car ride to Norway House from Winnipeg — that’s halfway — and they were in a York boat. You arrive here with your four bags and almost no infrastructure. Just what you brought.
Now what?
You cut trees. It was a hard life.
The first thing needed was firewood, building material, and charcoal for blacksmithing. Wood was needed for boats and carts, barns and furniture. Later, wood fuelled steam trains and steamboats. Trees were cleared for farmland.
And any savanna left soon failed. When settlers tilled the land and removed the tall grass, fire no longer swept through. Without fire, shrubs and fast‑growing trees took over, shading out young oaks. The open savanna closed, and the ancient system collapsed.
There are still stands of the old savanna, but limited now. Southern Manitoba is known for its open prairie and big sky, not its trees. The trees that were here were essential for human survival. When the trains came, they hauled lumber from forested regions to Winnipeg, but the land was forever changed.
The survivors of the old oak savanna still stand guard as monuments to a land that once was.
What Remains
Today there is little left of what the old bur oaks built. Most of the structures made from their beams are gone. If I can find an example of a building that still stands, I’ll post a photograph.
As a kid who played among the old giants, the value of time stayed with me. When we moved in 1986 to southern Manitoba near New Bothwell, the bur oak didn’t exist there. Not many trees did. I planted trees and learned to care for them, but I missed the oaks.
So one day, 35 years ago, I drove down to the Red River and hunted for a bur oak sapling. I found one, dug it up with a spade, put it in the trunk of my car, drove home, and planted it. It’s still growing today. Slow, steady, stubborn — a tree for future generations unless someone cuts it down.
Oaks don’t ask for much. The soil doesn’t need to be great. They just need time and water. They can live up to 500 years, though wind takes almost all of them long before that.
In my own yard today, I have four big giants from the old savanna — so large I can’t wrap my arms around them; I’m ten inches short. These trees could be 250 to 300 years old. Those four trees were part of the reason I bought this house. They’re a reminder of the days I spent in North Kildonan with the long‑gone giants.
A New Day
Today is a new day, and tomorrow is up to us. It doesn’t matter that the savanna is gone. We can’t reverse that. But if someone plants a bur oak today, they’re planting a tree for people they will never meet.
The carbon capture of a bur oak outmatches any other Manitoba tree — it holds carbon for centuries. It won’t grow fast. It won’t shoot up like a poplar or a maple. It will take decades just to look like something, and centuries to become a giant.
But that’s the point.
A bur oak is a gift to the future. It’s a promise that the land will still have shade, and acorns, and a place for hawks to perch long after we’re gone. Planting one is an act of faith — the same faith the old savanna had when it grew here after the ice left.
Time is the only thing an oak asks for, and time is the only thing we can give it.
The old savanna is gone, but the oak’s story is older than loss.
It has survived fire, ice, drought, and time itself.
It will survive us too, if we let it.
All we have to do is plant — and trust the centuries to do the rest.
The Work Continues
Today, these trees still get removed — they die, or wind damages them, or they’re in the way of progress. Many are salvaged at Urban Lumber. They have a sawmill and kiln, and the trees are sold to folks like me so I can build in my shop with one of these legends.
It’s a privilege to work with them. And the respect owed to the history of a Manitoba bur oak will be given in my shop.
What’s Left of the Bur Oak Savanna Today
The savanna disappeared long ago, but the giants remain. In many neighbourhoods, old bur oaks still stand exactly where the acorn fell, holding the memory of the world they grew up in. They’re quiet survivors, carrying the shape of the old land in their bones.
Step inside Behind the Grain, if you’d like to sit awhile.
If you’d like more stories about wood, craft, and the history hidden in everyday materials, you can join my mailing list below. New Shop Ramble every Monday.
Henderson House is one of the last surviving Red River frame homes, built around 1854 from squared bur oak cut along the Red River. Its beams came from the same giants described above—trees shaped by wind, fire, and prairie time. The house stands now as proof of what those oaks once were: the bones of the first homes on this land.
Written by David Flather, Red Seal cabinetmaker and founder of Knotty Dave’s Fine Woodworking — a Manitoba shop rooted in heritage restoration, storytelling, and real craft.
All photos shot by David Flather — in the shop, on the road, and in the places where craft and story meet.
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