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'Witness Trees' Testify to History, Embody Hope for Visitors
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The last living thing to come out of the Ground Zero rubble was a tree. And at the time, it was just a stump that looked dead. But the badly damaged Bradford pear tree was nursed back to health and replanted as part of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum site.
"People line up for upwards of 20 to 30 minutes to be photographed in front of this tree," says Charles Birnbaum, the founder and CEO of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, in an interview for the podcast The Stuff of Life. "To have that tangible connection to something that survived that day, it's incredibly powerful."