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Mark Bays was visiting the Survivor Tree at the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum recently, sharing its story of hope and renewal to a group of volunteers when a busload of international tourists arrived.

Bays, an urban forestry coordinator the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, watched as the visitors heard the tree's story and marveled at its outstretched branches, reaching toward the heavens.

All of a sudden, they all started hugging it.

???It has sent its message of hope and healing and getting beyond tragedy all over the world,??? Bays said. ???It's helped beyond Oklahoma.???

Bays speaks of the tree in reverent tones and refers to it as a living, breathing creature ??" because it is, and because he knows the noble American elm that inspires so many nearly didn't make it.

???It is a true survivor,??? he said.

It was a scrawny, solitary parking lot tree that somehow survived its roots being paved over when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building complex was completed in 1977. Sealing its roots off in concrete alone could have killed the tree, but it lived and shaded cars in the parking lot.

Then on April 19, 1995, the tree survived the explosion of a 4,000-pound bomb that ripped open a nine-story building, killing 168 people. Cars caught fire next to it and scorched the tree's south-facing trunk and branches.

The tree was almost cut down to recover valuable shards of evidence lodged in its trunk and limbs. But as a strong-willed, shaken city began the process of recovery, a group of people decided that could never happen.

It wasn't until early 1996 that discussions started about how best to preserve the tree, Bays recalled.

The year before, ???the wounds were so fresh and we were still trying to question why this all happened.???

As planning for the memorial site began, the planners reached out to Bays. He'd heard they were going to begin pruning it, and heard another rumor that it suffered from Dutch elm disease.

Bays' role as an urban forestry coordinator for the state is to preserve the ???green infrastructure??? of cities. He worked with a group of tree experts and volunteers to rescue the tree.

???It needed some help,??? he said. ???But the tree had made it through so much; I knew that there was hope.???

The team gingerly removed the concrete that surrounded its roots, composted and watered it.

???I can only imagine how the tree was feeling then,??? Bays said.

The scorched, charred portions healed on their own. For years after the bombing, the tree's caretakers would find little pieces of glass in its branches while pruning. The promontory structure surrounding the tree was designed to have as little impact on the tree's root system as possible, using a pain-staking network of hand-dug piers and a special irrigation and aeration system.

???If you give (trees) all that they need, they really do a have a remarkable ability to recover,??? he said.

Twenty years later, the tree has recovered and thrived, much like the city where it stands. Millions of visitors have come to see it at the memorial and read the inscription surrounding it: ???The spirit of this city and this nation will not be defeated; our deeply rooted faith sustains us.???

Every year, seeds from the tree are taken to grow saplings that are eventually planted elsewhere, as a symbol of the tree's endurance and to comfort victims of other tragedies.

Several years ago, horticulturalist Gerald Klingaman wrote about the Survivor Tree's unlikely place in history for a University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service publication, pointing out its modest stature for an elm, only about 40 feet tall.

???The tree's low-forked trunk is tilted at an odd angle and, were the circumstance different, it would have hardly attracted visitors' notice,??? Klingaman wrote. ???But in the aftermath of the blast, the off-balanced yet well-rooted stature of the tree make it a perfect symbol for survival. ... The very fibers of its bole seem to radiate hope for the future just as a lighthouse sends its light into the dark night.???