The Arbre du Ténéré was the loneliest tree in the world. It stood on a caravan route in the Ténéré region of Niger, in the dune seas of the Sahara. Arbre du Ténéré, in the company of some other little Acacia trees, took root there a long time earlier, when the ground was not quite so dry. After things dried up and his colleagues dwindled away, Arbre du Ténéré stuck around—his roots stretching 131 feet into the soil and his isolation stretching 120 miles in all directions.
Michel Lesourd described the tree in 1939:
One must see the Tree to believe its existence. What is its secret? How can it still be living in spite of the multitudes of camels which trample at its sides. How at each azalai does not a lost camel eat its leaves and thorns? Why don’t the numerous Touareg leading the salt caravans cut its branches to make fires to brew their tea? The only answer is that the tree is taboo and considered as such by the caravaniers.
There is a kind of superstition, a tribal order which is always respected. Each year the azalai gather round the Tree before facing the crossing of the Ténéré. The Acacia has become a living lighthouse; it is the first or the last landmark for the azalai leaving Agadez for Bilma, or returning.
Thirty-odd years later, the Arbre du Ténéré’s loneliness was abruptly ended:
The tree was knocked down by an allegedly drunk Libyan truck driver in 1973.
(List of famous trees is occupying my brain today.)
The most important tree in the WHOLE WORLD is still alive, genetically, but stuck in the middle of Riverside, CA for all eternity:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliza_Tibbe…
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=33%C2%B056…
@1, your Wikipedia article doesn’t make it clear — is that tree in your Google map Eliza Tibbet’s original orange tree? It’s not the other “Mother Orange Tree” that the article links to, because that one’s in Oroville (and while it is an earlier orange tree, it’s not the navel orange that really got the industry moving.
My favorite tree is an ancient Douglas-Fir in Deception Pass State Park, along the beach nature path south of the park building. Instead of being tall and noble like most Doug firs, it’s split and twisted and bent and sprawling more like a juniper, but it’s HUGE. It’s close enough to the parking lot to have taken a lot of abuse from humans over the past century or so, but it’s still there. A beautiful survivor.
Yes, the google link is for the “Mother Navel Orange Tree”. The “Mother Orange Tree” is a rootstock shit orange tree of zero commerce….but the first!
An great book for this area is Arthur Lee Jacobson’s ‘Trees of Seattle’.
How about General Sherman, the ancient Sequoia tree in Sequoia National Park?
How about General Sherman, the ancient Sequoia tree in Sequoia National Park?
Let me get this straight……
There is a tree.
No other tree around for 120 miles.
Everybody know this tree.
People practically pilgrimage to this tree.
A drunkard hits it.
How the F@%# do you explain that when you get home in the morning?
@6, sounds like the popular urban legend that in 1895 (1897, 1903, 1905) there were only two cars in all of Ohio (Kansas, Nebraska, Illinois, Sydney Australia) and they crashed into each other.