Tree seeds circled the moon. Then were planted here. Now they’re endangered.

Soon, one of Georgia’s surviving Moon Trees is expected to be cut down to make way for a new courthouse here downtown.

“We made it a permanent resident 50 years ago and now we are destroying its home and chopping it down,” said Melanie Ford, a University of Georgia employee trying to preserve the tree.

The Athens tree’s uncertain future comes as the broader history of such trees has become harder to trace. The online registry of surviving Moon Trees was among the webpages removed when NASA shuttered the Goddard Space Flight Center library earlier this year amid downsizing directives by the Trump administration.

David Williams is among those challenging the broader closure of the library, which housed a collection of NASA historical resources. He retired last year after helping build and maintain the trees’ online registry.

Ford is fighting to save one Moon Tree. Williams, with the help of an astronaut’s daughter and others, is fighting to make sure the rest aren’t forgotten.

‘Cool story nobody knows about’

Williams, who lives in Maryland, didn’t intend on becoming the keeper of America’s Moon Trees.

In the 1990s, he was responsible for NASA’s planetary and lunar data, preserving information dating back to the beginning of the space program. Part of his job was transferring records from microfilm and microfiche into digital formats as the internet was taking hold.

On webpages about Apollo missions, Williams included his email address.

Then one day, a message arrived from a third-grade teacher in Indiana.

Her class was working on a project when students came across a tree with a sign that read “Moon Tree.” The teacher had a question for NASA: Did anyone know what this was?

“I had never heard of Moon Trees before,” Williams said.

So he started asking questions.

He contacted NASA’s history office. He searched through records and archives. Eventually, he found a few newspaper articles mentioning the trees.

“I thought about it, what a cool story nobody knows about,” Williams said.

He created a webpage dedicated to Moon Trees alongside NASA’s other Apollo-related resources.

Then the emails started coming.

People sent photographs of trees with plaques. They shared stories about trees in their communities. They wondered whether the tree outside their school, park or government building might have come from one of the space-traveling seeds.

Then Williams heard from the family of the astronaut who had carried the seeds around the moon.

“All of a sudden I had the whole story,” Williams said.

Parachuting wildfire fighter turned astronaut

Before Williams was trying to find America’s Moon Trees, Stuart Roosa carried the seeds that would become them.

Like all Apollo astronauts, Roosa was allowed to bring a small personal kit aboard the mission. Others packed wedding rings, college mementos, state and American flags.

Roosa, the command module pilot on Apollo 14, filled part of his kit with hundreds of tree seeds — loblolly pine, sycamore, sweetgum, redwood and Douglas fir — to represent forests across the United States.

The idea reflected Roosa’s life before NASA, when he served as a smokejumper for the U.S. Forest Service, parachuting into remote wildfires to battle blazes in Oregon and California.

He died in 1994, at the age of 61, more than 20 years after carrying the seeds around the moon.

“I think he knew he was doing something different,” said Roosa’s daughter, Rosemary, who lives in Mississippi. “But he didn’t know it would have this much of an impact.”

Today, Roosa carries on her father’s work as president of the Moon Tree Foundation, a nonprofit she established to preserve the legacy of the Apollo 14 Moon Trees and inspire future generations through space exploration.

“I think a little bit of his spirit is in each one of those trees,” she said.

Because the seeds weren’t part of an official NASA experiment, nobody was assigned to track them after they were planted. Roosa planted some himself. The Forest Service distributed others. States and local communities decided where many would grow. Over time, no complete record of where they ended up ever existed.

“That’s part of the reason why it was kind of lost,” Williams said. “It was sort of this friendly thing done together as a loose collaboration.”

More than 50 years later, NASA’s Artemis program has sent a new generation of tree seeds around the moon, continuing the tradition Roosa began. Some were planted in Georgia, including campuses at Georgia Southern University and Young Harris College.

Credit: Fletcher Page

Credit: Fletcher Page

‘Tangible connection to our history’

The Athens Moon Tree spent its first decades mostly unnoticed.

It was planted in May 1976 outside what was then a public library, one of hundreds of Moon Trees planted across the country as part of the nation’s Bicentennial celebration. When the building later became the county planning commission office, the loblolly pine remained, quietly growing near the parking lot.

It became part of the landscape before most people knew it was part of history.

In 2021, the tree received a new historical marker recognizing its journey from Earth to the moon and back again. For a moment, the Moon Tree was no longer just a pine tree. It was a piece of the Apollo program standing in plain sight.

Five years later, plans call for its removal.

In June, Athens-Clarke County commissioners and the mayor moved forward with construction of a new 218,215-square-foot courthouse on the site of the planning commission office. The estimated cost of the project is $225 million.

Ford, UGA’s senior director of construction, acting on her own and not on behalf of the university, has proposed changes that would allow the courthouse project to incorporate the Moon Tree rather than remove it.

County officials say that would be difficult.

“There are development choices that could be made,” said county deputy manager Andrew Saunders, “... that would be less impactful to the moon tree if our elected body determines that we should try to keep it. In my professional opinion, it would be unlikely that the tree would survive construction.”

Saunders understands why people want to preserve it. Before joining county administration, he worked as a forestry coordinator and has spent his career studying the relationship between communities and trees.

The county is working with the U.S. Forest Service and UGA to collect seeds and propagate the tree, potentially creating hundreds of descendants.

“Not only would we try to reincorporate them into the (courthouse) site, but it also allows us to distribute them into the community,” Saunders said.

Athens has preserved the legacy of a famous tree before.

The Tree That Owns Itself, a white oak on the edge of downtown believed to be hundreds of years old, was reportedly deeded to itself in the 1890s by Colonel William Henry Jackson. After a windstorm destroyed the original tree in 1942, the tree’s acorns were planted at the site. Today, a second-generation oak stands in its place, with the unusual deed still uncontested.

For Saunders, that history offers a possible path forward for the Moon Tree.

“It gives people a way to humanize the urban forest,” Saunders said. “It also creates a tangible connection to our history.”

‘Athens is lucky’

Ford might not be able to save Athens’ original Moon Tree. Williams doesn’t know whether NASA’s registry will return.

But both are trying to protect the same thing: a reminder that some history is not kept in museums or behind glass. Sometimes it grows quietly outside a courthouse, a school or a park, waiting for someone to remember why it mattered.

Even as some Moon Trees disappear, others are being rediscovered.

Ford has worked to identify other Moon Trees planted in Georgia during the nation’s Bicentennial celebration. There is a loblolly pine in Waycross. A tree reportedly planted in Savannah remains lost. A sycamore at the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta is believed to be a Moon Tree, though it currently lacks a marker explaining its significance.

In Macon, Ford helped the Georgia Forestry Commission identify a Moon Tree that had largely faded from memory. In 2024, a man and woman who appeared as 5-year-olds in photographs from the tree’s 1976 planting ceremony helped locate the tree. More than four decades later, they were reunited with a piece of history they helped create.

“Moon trees can do a lot in terms of bringing people together and giving them a sense of place,” Ford said.

Rosemary Roosa says only about 70 of the trees planted with seeds from the Apollo 14 mission are still alive.

There are no seeds remaining.

“Athens is lucky to have an original tree,” she said. “It’s hard to preserve something, but this is so rare. It’s been to the moon and back.”