Rose Bud, AR American Holly State Record

The Daily Citizen

ROSE BUD - One of the many reasons White County stands out among the many beautiful places in the Ozark foothills is a state record American holly tree found three miles south of Rose Bud.

At its home on the old Crisco place on Valley View Road south of Rose Bud, the tree has been a local landmark for generations.

“That tree's been part of my life all my life,” said Wyevette (Haney) Jackson. “It had stickers under it so you didn't play under it. It had red berries on it and bluejays would eat them.”

As a child, Jackson worked for the Crisco family picking cotton and strawberries, so she saw the tree often.

Danny “Talkin' Dan” Crisco, 69, is now the tree's owner. Retired as a heavy equipment operator and living in Searcy, Crisco inherited the homeplace and the tree from his mother, Bertie Crisco, widow of Huey Crisco.

“As far as I'm concerned, that tree belonged to her,” Crisco said. “That was her tree.”

Bertie died in 1997, but her home is still kept up, with the tree standing near the road out in front.

“Ms. Bertie made some of the best choke biscuits you've had,” Jackson said. “She choked ‘em off instead of using a biscuit cutter.”

Bertie's tree survived the Dec. 6, 1982 tornado that destroyed Rose Bud, only losing a scooped-out section at the top.

“That tree's been there as long as I can remember,” Crisco said. “There was a bunch of people that came out from Little Rock and measured that tree, the height and width and I don't know what all.”

The Arkansas Forestry Commission designated it an Arkansas Champion Tree on Aug. 1, 1983, measuring its circumference then at 116 inches, its spread at 57 feet and its height at 54 feet, giving it a “bigness index” of 184. Bertie was given a certificate which still hangs on the living room wall of the home.

“Everything's got a story,” Crisco said. “That holly tree . . . my dad would park his truck underneath it and use it as a garage.”

And the tree not only played a part in the life of the family, but also with their animals.

“We had us as good a chicken house as you ever wanted, and them old chickens decided to stay up there in that holly tree,” Crisco said. “They'd go to the chicken house and lay eggs in there and then go back to the holly tree.”

Even the sounds in the family's yard were changed by the tree's presence.

“A certain time of the year you could hear a continuous buzz from the bees and wasps out there in the tree,” Crisco said.

Crisco, who attended Rose Bud High School, said an old wooden school bus would pull up at the tree to pick him up and drop him off there in the evenings.

“I don't know how many it would hold, but I know how many it took to push it,” Crisco said of the homemade bus. “Highway 36 was gravel and all the side roads were dirt. We put in a lot of time pushing that old bus.”

Family members and friends carved their initials in Bertie's tree, leaving a living legacy of times gone by.