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It came from the moon, and now it's dying

In Washington Square Park, in soil that once cradled the dead bodies of slaves, soldiers and strangers, it took root.

In Washington Square Park, in soil that once cradled the dead bodies of slaves, soldiers and strangers, it took root.

Where some of the darkest memories of our planet were buried, so, too, was a tree that had been to the darkest side of our moon.

Of the approximately 400 seeds that NASA astronaut Stuart Roosa took with him to the moon in 1971, only about 60 "moon trees" are confirmed to exist today, said Dave Williams, NASA planetary curation scientist.

Philadelphia has one - and it's dying.

When Roosa was tapped to pilot the command module for Apollo 14's trip to the moon in February 1971, he contacted his friends at the U.S. Forest Service, where he previously worked parachuting into forest fires.

For the journey, they gave him about 400 seeds from several species of trees - sycamore, loblolly pine, sweet gum, redwood and Douglas fir.

"This was not a NASA experiment," said Roosa's son, Marine Col. Christopher Roosa, of Arlington, Va. "This is something he did as a tribute to the Forest Service and his love of nature."

During the journey, while his fellow astronauts descended to the moon, Roosa and the seeds orbited the celestial body alone in the command module 34 times.

Roosa, who died in 1994, was one of six people to have orbited the moon.

"He was one of six men considered to have been the furthest from any other human being in history," Williams said.

As were the seeds he carried.

"I remember my dad talking about being at the moon . . . and how space is blacker than black," Christopher Roosa said. "He brought something back from there that could grow."

Upon return, during the decontamination process, the case in which the seeds were kept burst in a vacuum and were feared to be unviable, Williams said.

But the Forest Service gathered the seeds and planted them at stations in Mississippi and California, where they began to grow.

Beginning in 1975 and continuing through the Bicentennial celebration, the trees were gifted around the country and the world. Many ended up at government centers, schools, parks and historic spaces, including the White House.

Others ended up in hospitals, private homes and as far away as Brazil and Japan.

Since the gifting of a moon tree was considered public relations, no one kept an official list of the trees or where they were planted, Williams said.

"Today, there's no way to tell a moon tree apart, no scientific way," he said. "I imagine there's a lot out there that have never been marked, or are no longer marked."

The dedication of Philadelphia's "Bicentennial Moon Tree," one of the first to be planted, was inexplicably held in 1975. It was coordinated by a local branch of the Forest Service and attended by Stuart Roosa, a native of Durango, Colo.

The plaque below our tree reads: "Honoring Earth's green world of trees".

Howard Burnett, who lived in Exton at the time and worked for the Forest Service, attended the ceremony with his wife and sons.

"At that time, we weren't so sure what would happen to living things in space," Burnett, now 78, said. "If you took sycamore seeds up, you weren't so sure what you'd get back.

"As the tree grew, that was proof that space wasn't so bad at all," he said.

The tree's decline over the last several years is not related to its lunar journey, said Williams and Susan Edens, cultural landscape architect with the Independence National Historical Park Service, which provides custodial care to Washington Square.

"It's never been a very healthy tree," she said. "No one was able to pinpoint the decline. It hasn't been attacked by insects, there's no major damage to the trunk and no diseases people could figure out."

The tree looks like something out of a Tim Burton film now - skinny, yearning and bare. It went into a "tail spin" within the last year and produced very few leaves in the spring, Edens said.

"I think that tree might not make it through the winter," she said.

So in June, about 20 cuttings were taken from the tree and sent to the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University to be cloned.

If the project succeeds, the new tree will "have the same genetic information" as the old one, Edens said.

When one of the clones is of a sustainable size, which may take years, it will be planted where the original tree now stands.

In the meantime, to serve as a placeholder, the Park Service is planning to purchase a second-generation moon tree from American Forests, a nonprofit conservation organization that sells historic trees.

Philadelphia's moon tree isn't the first to wane.

Others, like the one planted at the White House, have succumbed to natural causes and some have fallen victim to lightning, hurricanes and expansions of used-car lots. They've gotten in the way of a society whose path no longer leads toward the moon, yet whose existence is intrinsically dependent upon it.

"The tree itself, I'm sure lots of people walk past it," Burnett said. "But maybe once in a while someone stops and sees how it ties together the moon, us and the glory of mother nature."