Alexander Drake, a wheeler-dealer from Michigan, sold his Mirror Pond homesite to the city of Bend for $21,000 back in 1921. Today, visitors and more than a few residents marvel at this genuine, if accidental, monument to land-use planning.

John Simpson, landscape architect for Bend Parks and Recreation District, draws a bold parallel when he calls Drake’s 11 acres ”the Central Park of Oregon.”

New York City’s unique public amenity, designed by Frederick Olmstead in 1857, covers 840 acres and cost $5 million. That pencils out to almost $6,000 an acre, three times the rate paid for Drake Park.

But Central Park still qualifies as quite a bargain. It occupies 1.3 square miles of very high-ticket real estate, and the island of Manhattan is 23 square miles small. Bend, meanwhile, has spread out to 32.3 square miles.

This pencils out to a thought-provoking comparison: one acre of park per 16 acres of Manhattan Island vs. one acre of Drake Park for every 2,000 acres of Bend.

But enough caffeinated number-crunching.

Let’s take a stroll through Drake Park and enjoy its trees – some of them are older than the United States itself – and leave the other aspects of park matchup for another time.

October is a fine month for such outings. The deciduous members of the tree family will soon lose their leaves, and many of them sport colorful fashions in honor of this yearly seasonal change. Besides, recognizing deciduous species when their leaves are gone is much harder.

The evergreens should be familiar. Ponderosa pine, the money tree on this side of the Cascades, has long needles in groups of three, modest-size cones (3 to 5 inches) and, on mature specimens, a golden-bronze bark that looks like a jigsaw puzzle when you get close (some people see a plate of those ”goldfish” crackers).

Ponderosas are indigenous; so are lodgepoles, a smaller pine with needles in groups of two and cones about 2 inches tall.

There is one evergreen that isn’t native: the larch. Its needles come in clusters, which grow on spurs, as well as singly, on longer stems. Larch needles turn golden yellow around this time every year, and fall shortly thereafter. There is a trio of larches on the east edge of the park, near Riverside Boulevard between Kansas and Louisiana avenues.

Another conifer (cone-bearer) on the Drake Park roster is the spruce. Spruce can be recognized by the way its needles are attached – one at a time, each with its own peg connecting to the stem. The blue spruce, a favorite of landscape designers, adds subtle variety to the color palette.

If you cross the pedestrian bridge headed southeast, you’ll see two spruces, both with healthy loads of cones. Just past them, in the ”Y” of the walkway, there’s a blue spruce with cones near the top. The color is striking.

Cedars and junipers complete Drake Park’s evergreen list. If it has scalelike leaves and berries instead of cones, it’s a juniper. If it has small, upright cones and its foliage consists of flat, overlapping scales that are whitish on the underside, it’s a cedar.

The yellows and occasional reds in Drake’s fall fashion statement come from leaf pigments in birch, locust, ash, oak, poplar, willow and maple trees. The easy-to-spot paper birch features peeling, snow-white bark and long, dangling stems of double-tooth leaves.

The low sun of October, especially in the morning and late afternoon, makes the yellow leaves glow. There is a nice birch on the northwest end of the footbridge, and several beauties in the front yards of homes along Riverside Boulevard.

If the leaves are scarlet, or getting that way, chances are it’s a maple. If the tree has a light gray bark, almost the color of aluminum, and the leaves are attached by red stalks, it’s probably a red maple. These are most conspicuous along the perimeter of the park, especially on Riverside Boulevard. The blaze of reds and oranges along Wall and Bond streets is the work of oaks, but these trees are relatively rare in the park.

Ash and locust trees are less flamboyant.

Their wardrobes are limited to yellows and browns. Both trees have compound leaves – multiples of the same leaflet on a long stalk called a midrib.

Thorns indicate a locust, while berries – pea-size, reddish-orange, in clusters – mean it’s an ash. The wood is exceptionally strong, but can be turned without splitting. Baseball bats and ax handles come from ash. Locust, just as tough, is much harder to work and usually ends up as fence posts or railroad ties.

If you’re walking along the southeast shore of Mirror Pond, headed upriver toward the footbridge, look for a large ash with deep, moss-covered ridges in its bark. It’s not as old as the big ponderosas, but it may have been there before 1900, the year Alexander Drake arrived.

If you’re walking along Wall Street anywhere near the Bend branch of the Deschutes Public Library System, stop in to see if the Peterson ”First Guides” tree book is available. It is highly reader-friendly and fits in a shirt pocket.

You’re only three blocks from the park, and there are several espresso outlets en route.