While newspaper front pages are always made of dead trees, dead trees rarely make newspaper front pages.

But in the case of the Weeping Beech tree in Flushing, you don’t have to be Parks Commissioner to mourn the loss.

After all, we grow trees in our own image. From the Tree of Life to the Family Tree, they provide countless metaphors for the human condition. The experience of the Weeping Beech was not only human-like, its story was uniquely American, and uniquely Queens...