The tree of hope lives on

Trees vividly -- and naturally -- symbolize life, growth and hope. Few folks are cynical enough to be unmoved by the wondrous transformation of a small seed growing into something big and beautiful, reaching upward and outward.

Another symbolic inspiration: Trees endure. Scientists estimate that some of the giant sequoias still living in California are at least 2,700 years old.

Our own epic Angel Oak has been living on Johns Island for up to 1,500 years if you accept the age estimate of its most ardent fans, or as few as 500 if you don't.

Now a horse-chestnut tree a mere 150 years old and more than 4,000 miles from Angel Oak is again providing powerful inspiration all its own. Severely weakened by fungus and moths, it was marked for destruction in 2007 by civic officials, who cited the risk of its collapse.

The tree's protectors succeeded in blocking that fate. However, they couldn't prevent the continuing decline of the tree, which was felled last week not by municipal order but by stormy winds that snapped it in two. The tree's defenders vow to bring it back, in effect, at that same site from an existing shoot of its trunk. Plus, over the last few years, hundreds of the tree's clones have already been planted, including 11 in the United States.

Why does that old chestnut tree rate so much devotion?

Because of this:

"Nearly every morning I go to the attic to blow the stuffy air out of my lungs, from my favorite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind. As long as this exists, I thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts I cannot be unhappy."

That touching tribute was written in early 1944 by a 14-year-old girl who had every reason to be not just unhappy but consumed by despair and bitterness.

Yet as she braved her third year of hiding from the Nazi genocide machine, isolated in the cramped quarters of an Amsterdam apartment, she penned that elevating message of life, growth and hope.

Though she died 13 months later in a concentration camp, her uplifting affirmation of humanity's ultimate triumph over inhumanity lives on.

And so will the descendents of "the bare chestnut" now rightly known as the Anne Frank tree.