In 1973 a reportedly drunk driver flattened a tree in the middle of the Sahara, which sounds unremarkable until you learn it was the only tree for 250 miles around, a 300-year-old acacia so isolated it was marked on maps covering half a continent.

There are roughly two occasions in the entire history of human cartography when a working continental map has felt obliged to include a single individual tree as a labelled feature. Both are in Niger. The northern one is called the Arbre Perdu or Lost Tree. It’s a small acacia clinging to an exposed root mound in a section of the Aïr Mountains where nothing else grows. The other is considerably more famous and no longer standing. It was called the Arbre du Ténéré or Tree of Ténéré. Until the night of 8 November 1973 it grew alone in the middle of the Ténéré desert in northeastern Niger. The nearest other tree was roughly four hundred kilometres away in any direction. That night an allegedly drunk Libyan truck driver crossed the desert in a heavy transport lorry. He had an open horizon in every direction and could have avoided almost any obstacle a moving vehicle might encounter. He drove directly into the tree instead. It has been considered dead since.

How a lone acacia survives in the middle of the Sahara

The Ténéré desert sits at the geographical heart of the Sahara. It receives on average less than twenty-five millimetres of rainfall per year. Ground temperatures routinely exceed sixty degrees Celsius in summer. There’s no surface water anywhere in the region. And for roughly the last six thousand years the region has been essentially uninhabitable by trees. That’s since the end of the African Humid Period when the Sahara turned from green savanna into the desert it is today.

According to Atlas Obscura’s reference entry on the Last Tree of Ténéré, drawing on the field notes of Michel Lesourd of the Central Service of Saharan Affairs, the Tree of Ténéré was the last surviving member of what had once been a small forest of acacias. In the winter of 1938 and 1939 a French military survey team dug a well near the tree. They found that its roots had already reached the water table nearly forty metres below the surface. That was how the tree was still alive when nothing else was. Over its three-century lifespan it had sent its root system straight down through sand and hardpan to reach the last surviving underground aquifer in the region.

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The tree became a landmark of extraordinary practical importance for the Tuareg nomads. They crossed the Ténéré every year as part of the Azalai salt caravan between Agadez in the south and Bilma in the north. The crossing took roughly three weeks each way. For the first and last week of it the Tree of Ténéré was the only visible landmark anywhere on the horizon. It functioned effectively as a lighthouse for the caravan navigators. The Tuareg treated it as a sacred object. They never cut its branches for firewood. They never allowed their camels to eat its leaves. Michel Lesourd in his 1939 field notes expressed genuine astonishment that a single acacia surrounded by a hungry caravan of hundreds of camels had survived at all. The answer by his own investigation was simple. The tree was taboo. Nobody touched it. Not for anything.

What happened to it in the end

The tree’s protected status held for centuries. It began to erode in the middle of the twentieth century when motorised transport arrived in the Sahara. Motor vehicles don’t consult tribal customs. Their drivers were often Libyan or Algerian long-haul truckers passing through Niger on commercial routes. They weren’t local Tuareg caravaners with generational knowledge of the region. They didn’t necessarily know what the tree was or why it mattered. Henri Lhote had visited the tree in 1934. He returned in November 1959 as part of the Berliet-Ténéré scientific expedition and found it had already been badly damaged. A lorry heading to Bilma had collided with it despite having plenty of space to avoid it. One of the tree’s two distinct trunks had been snapped off.

The tree held on for another fourteen years. Then one night in November 1973 another truck driver drove into it at speed and finished it off. This one was reportedly drunk on what French sources have described as a bottle of something strong. According to Smithsonian Magazine’s October 2013 reporting by the science journalist Rachel Nuwer, the truck driver’s name was never publicly recorded. But the identifying detail that has stuck to the story ever since is that the collision took place on a stretch of desert flat enough for the driver to have swerved several hundred metres in any direction. Nigerien officials collected what remained of the tree. They transported it to the Niger National Museum in Niamey roughly a thousand kilometres away. The dried trunk remains on public display there today. A simple metal sculpture welded from recycled pipes and fuel barrels was later erected at the original site.

What the story of the Tree of Ténéré actually represents is the death of the last surviving evidence of an ecosystem that had once covered most of the region and no longer exists. That witness had survived the entire desertification process. It had adapted physiologically to conditions that killed every other tree in the region. It had kept growing there for three centuries after the last of its neighbours died. It had survived generations of Tuareg caravan crossings. It had survived a French military presence. It had survived being included on Michelin road maps at scales normally reserved for entire countries. What it hadn’t been capable of surviving was the intersection of a motor vehicle, an inebriated driver, and a stretch of desert flat enough that no natural obstacle stood between them. The metal sculpture that stands there now weighs several tonnes and is bolted into concrete footings. It cannot be knocked over by a truck. Which is not quite the same thing as what was there before. But it’s apparently the best available substitute.