The Tree That Would Not Die: The Remarkable Story of 9/11's "Survivor Tree"

Amid the wreckage of Ground Zero, recovery workers found something in October 2001 that no one expected to find alive: a tree.

The Callery pear had been planted between the Twin Towers in the 1970s, offering shade to office workers on their lunch breaks for decades. When the towers fell, the tree was buried under rubble, its roots snapped and its trunk charred black. By the time it was pulled free a month later, it stood barely eight feet tall - reduced to a handful of leaves clinging to one branch.

Almost no one expected it to survive. The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation took the tree in anyway, replanting it at a nursery in the Bronx and nursing it back to health over nearly a decade. By 2010, it had grown to 30 feet and was strong enough to go home. It was replanted at the National September 11 Memorial, where it's stood ever since, and became known simply as the Survivor Tree.

Now, every spring, it's usually the first tree in the entire memorial plaza to bloom - a burst of white flowers standing out against the leafless oaks planted around it, a reminder that new life can return even to the places that seemed most destroyed.

Since 2013, the memorial has given out hundreds of seedlings grown from the Survivor Tree to communities around the world that have faced their own tragedies, from Boston to Orlando to Paris - carrying its story, and its hope, far beyond where it first took root.

Twenty-five years later, it's still growing.