The Survivor Tree

After the bombing, officials nearly took the tree down. The blast had driven glass and debris into its trunk, and the trunk was evidence. The elm stood in the car park across the street from the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, and it had stood there long before the building did. Photographs from the 1920s, when the ground was the back yard of a family home, show it already growing, which puts it at around a hundred years old. On 19 April 1995 the explosion stripped away most of its branches. It was left standing. About a year later it came into bloom again, and it was kept, as the centre of the outdoor grounds of the Oklahoma City National Memorial, on the north side of the site above the Field of Empty Chairs. The Rescuers' Orchard of redbuds, maples and elms was planted around it. It is tended now more closely than most trees anywhere. Seed is collected from it and grown on, and the seedlings go to visitors and to partner sites elsewhere in the country, so the tree exists in more places than this one. The outdoor memorial, the tree included, is open every hour of every day of the year and costs nothing. Only the indoor museum charges admission.