The Moon Tree of Friendly Plaza

This redwood has been around the Moon. In February 1971 the Apollo 14 command module carried roughly 2,000 tree seeds in lunar orbit while the lunar module was down on the surface. They belonged to Stuart Roosa, the command module pilot, and the question was whether the radiation of the trip would stop them germinating. It did not. Of the 150 coast redwood seeds in the batch, 20 came up at a Forest Service nursery in Placerville and 16 survived their first year. One of them was planted here on 27 July 1976, two feet tall, dedicated to the people of Monterey for the American Bicentennial. A plaque marks it. Fifty years on it is a redwood in a town square rather than a curiosity, standing in Friendly Plaza beside Colton Hall, where California's first constitution was drafted, and the old Monterey jail. Nobody walking between the two would guess where the seed had been. One honest note. Of the Moon Trees planted across California, only nine are reported still alive, and while the accounts of the fiftieth anniversary write about Monterey's as one of the survivors, no source we found says so in plain words. If you are standing in front of it, you know something we do not, and we would like to hear it.