MARILYN CORNWELL: Mairlyn's Photos - Sep 4 2026

I've been depicting trees in my watercolour/digital drawing work. This picture came up with this story.

"For 300 years, a single tree stood alone in the heart of the Sahara. The most isolated tree on earth. The only tree for 250 miles in any direction. In 1973, a truck driver hit it. The Tree of Ténéré was so significant that it was one of the only trees ever marked on a map drawn at a scale of 1:4,000,000. In a desert the size of a continent, cartographers felt it was too important to leave off. Caravans navigated by it. Tuareg nomads considered it sacred. The Tuareg people who passed it on their journeys never used it for firewood or allowed their camels to graze on it. In a desert where survival demanded using everything available, this single tree was left completely untouched out of reverence. During a dig near the tree in 1938, researchers found that its roots had reached the water table 33 to 36 metres below the surface. In 1973, a Libyan truck driver, reportedly drunk, followed the old caravan route and drove directly into the trunk. His name was never released. The impact shattered the acacia beyond recovery. The remains were taken to the National Museum of Niger in Niamey, where they are still kept today."

Reading the story, it comes across as a promotion for something or other product. It is that dramatic tone of voice. So I researched this to find out if it is a true story, and it is. This picture was taken in 1961 and is in the Wikipedia entry. Its name is the Tree of Ténéré.

It has been memorialized since its destruction, and there are reproductions of it in bronze in various places. And it joins a long list of famous trees that have been destroyed. The 200-ear-old Sycamore Gap Tree in Northumberland, England was chainsawed in 2023. The Golden Spruce, a rare genetic mutation, in Haida Gwaii, B.C. was destroyed in 1997 by a disgruntled forest worker. The Mark Twain Tree was a massive, 1,300 giant sequois in California's Sierra Nevada mountains. It was deliberately felled to send plants to museums to prove how big and old it was.

The oldest felled tree was Prometheus a britstlecone pine, cut down in 1964. It was thought to have been the oldest known organism on the planet - somewhere between 4800 and 5000 years old. This was in the U.S. where a student was studying trees in North Carolina and found a very old specimen He couldn't optain a sample core, so got permission to cut the tree down in order to count its rings.

There are more stories like these - covered HERE.

Doesn't this history lesson have a moral meaning. I had no idea our species is so consistent in its destruction of special things. And look out if you are a lone tree.