The First 9/11 Survivor Trees

10/27/22 • 51 min

The Survivor Tree is a well known tree planted at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York City that was rescued from the rubble at the World Trade Center site after the terrorist attacks. It has become a stirring symbol of resilience and survival visited by millions of people.
But few people remember there were six other trees rescued from the site and transplanted in early October of 2001. Host Doug Still was part of the City Parks Department team that found them along with his former boss Bram Gunther. Doug and Bram recount the day they visited Ground Zero, describe how these remarkable trees were saved, and discover what's become of them.

Guest
Bram Gunther
Native New Yorker; former Chief of Forestry, Horticulture, and Natural Resources for New York City Parks; co-founding partner of Dirt Collective, a start-up focused on re-wilding.
linkedin.com/in/bram-gunther-b8346522b
Podcast Consultant
Martha Douglas-Osmundson
Music
"Running Circles (Instrumental)," Cody Francis

Theme Music
Diccon Lee, www.deeleetree.com
Artwork
Dahn Hiuni, www.dahnhiuni.com/home
Website
thisoldtree.show
Transcripts available.
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This episode was written in part at LitArts RI, a community organization and co-working space that supports Rhode Island's creators.
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Previous Episode

Chronicling a Tree: Thoreau's Concord Elm

Concord, Massachusetts, 1856. Four men cut down a huge, seemingly healthy American elm tree using block and tackle, and ropes drawn by a horse. The graceful tree towered above a house whose owners heard creaking during a storm - they felt unsafe and had it removed. The event would have been long forgotten, except one of America’s greatest writers and earliest environmentalists also lived in Concord - Henry David Thoreau.

Supremely ticked-off, the removal of the stately elm inspired a flurry of journal writing by Thoreau that defined elms as symbols of virtue that looked to Concord’s past and the country’s future. Guest Thomas Campanella, Professor at Cornell University and author of Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm, shares his work. It turns out, elm trees helped define our young nation’s sense of itself.

Guest
Thomas J. Campanella
Professor of City and Regional Planning
Cornell University
Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm, Yale University Press, 2003.
Henry David Thoreau and the Yankee Elm, Arnoldia, 2001.
Other Sources:
Thoreau and the Language of Trees, Richard Higgins, Univ of California Press, 2017.
Podcast Consultant
Martha Douglas-Osmundson
Music
"Nothing Like the Summer," Brightarm Orchestra

Next Episode

The Mies van der Rohe Honeylocust of the Alfred Caldwell Grove

A big, old, thorny honeylocust tree on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago has a place within the history of modernist architecture and landscape design. How so? Professor and landscape architect Ron Henderson talks about the tree's relationship to Mies van der Rohe and his colleague Alfred Caldwell, and how the honeylocust became the feathery urban forest powerhouse it is today.

Guests
Ron Henderson
Professor and Director of Landscape Architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology
Founding Principal, LIRIO Landscape Architecture
lirio.work
https://arch.iit.edu/study/mla/
Richard Polansky
Owner, Hafs Road Orchard
Genoa City, Wisconsin
hafsroadorchard.com
Tree Story Short
Tom Brennan
Podcast Consultant
Martha Douglas-Osmundson

This Old Tree - The First 9/11 Survivor Trees

Transcript

Doug Still00:00:00.000

The Survivor Tree is a calllery pear tree that was rescued from the rubble at Ground Zero about a month after the 9/11 terrorist attack. It was a ragged trunk when they found it, but it was nursed back to health by New York City Parks Department horticulturalists and eventually planted back at the site as part of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. It has been visited by literally millions of people who have come to pay their respects and remember the