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Diane Cook and Len Jenshel

Aspens will put up new shoots in response to stress, but if those shoots are eaten by grazers like deer or cattle, the young trees don't have a chance to mature.

A quaking aspen tree, Pando aspen, in Fishlake National Forest, Utah. The trees are part of a single organism, called a clonal body.

These quaking aspen trees, in Fishlake National Forest, Utah, form the biggest single organism on the planet. Grazing deer and cattle that munch on newly sprouted trees are threatening the forest's survival.

Sixth graders line up in front of a Montezuma cypress in Santa María del Tule, Oaxaca, Mexico. This tree, which has a diameter of roughly 38 feet, appeared in a March 2017 story about famous trees around the world.

On April 19, 1995, a blast planned and executed by Timothy McVeigh, a disaffected veteran, destroyed the nine-floor Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in the center of Oklahoma City, incinerating cars and claiming 168 lives. It scorched the trunk and embedded debris in an American elm growing in a nearby parking lot. Today, the “survivor tree” is a feature of the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, and provides solace to family and friends of those who died in the blast like Doris Jones, whose 26-year-old daughter Carrie, pregnant at the time, perished in the explosion. “It’s as if that tree had a will to survive,” says Mark Bays, an urban forester for the state who helped nurse it to health. “It understood, when none of us understood, that it needed to be around.”

An important chapter in the story of the 1,000-year-old coastal redwood known as Luna in California’s Humboldt County is that of activist Julia Butterfly Hill. In 1997, Hill climbed the tree, which was threatened by logging operations of the Pacific Lumber Company, and stayed there for more than two years on a small, tented platform 180 feet above the ground, where she gave interviews by solar-powered phone. Finally, the logging company agreed to a conservation easement. In 2000, the tree was vandalized. A chainsaw cut left a three-foot-deep gash halfway around the tree’s circumference. Steel brackets and cables stabilize the tree, which endures.

In northern India, the neem tree is known as the healer of all ailments and an embodiment of the Hindu goddess Shitala, a mother figure. To neighborhood residents who worship this tree at the Nanghan Bir Baba Temple, in Varanasi, it is even more. “My son was born premature. The doctor told us he would surely die,” one man told David Haberman, a professor of religion at Indiana University and an expert in Hinduism. “But I prayed to this neem, and he lived.” The tree, dressed in colorful cloth, wears a face mask of the goddess to strengthen the connection between her and worshippers.

Yoshino cherry trees along the Tidal Basin in Washington, District of Columbia.

After the conflagration of 9/11 reduced the 110-floor high World Trade Towers in lower Manhattan to a metal carcass; after a dark day of suffocating smoke and ash; after the horror of 2,753 dead, one living thing was pulled from the wreckage—a Callery pear tree, which became a centerpiece of the 9/11 Memorial. The tree stands as an exemplar of the botany of grief, but also, resilience.