Baldwin county has the largest grapevine on record. It stands a mile and a half north of the town of Daphne and overlooks Mobile bay. It measures six feet one inch in circumference at the base and its branches are entwined among the tree-tops, reaching from one to another for rods around in all directions. The main trunk is about fifteen feet high and is supported in the crotch of a cedar now dead, the vine having sapped the life from the roots. There it stands today and there it has stood for a century at least. But its race is almost run, for some hunter, in the excitement of a ‘coon chase, when his appreciation for baked ‘coon was greater than his love for nature’s beauties, has used his ax on this king of vines with fatal effect and it now stands with a large hole in its side, revealing the great hollow in its trunk, into which the ‘coon ran for safety.–New Orleans Times-Democrat.
Is this a comment on short- versus long-term thinking? Eating or Art? No, I didn’t think so either.
A search for “largest grapevine” brings several possibilities:
The first is the grapevine in Chiltern, in Victoria Australia, planted in 1867. (And there isn’t any good picture or tourist information about it.)
The second is in Graaf-Reinet in the Western Cape of South Africa. It was planted in 1870.
The third is at the Hampton Court Palace Gardens (home of Henry VIII, etc). It was planted in 1768.
All these are pretty big looking. Makes me think that my mother’s twenty-two-year-old vines are just babies.
The New Orleans Times-Democrat was active until about 1914. It’s mentioned in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, and is well-known to readers of Lafcadio Hearn (he was its fiction editor in the 1880s).