Arborists want to clone the Lady Liberty tree in Seminole County’s Big Tree Park to create up to 100 genetic replicas for preservation and replanting across the country. (Video by Fox35)

By Martin E. Comas Staff Writer

She was putting down roots when Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii in 79 A.D.

She has lived through the rise and fall of great civilizations — flourishing in the same spot just west of U.S. Highway 17-92 for 2,000 years.

She has survived droughts, diseases, fires and the threat of chain saws.

Lady Liberty is considered one of the oldest baldcypress trees in the world — standing strong in Seminole County's Big Tree Park just north of Longwood on General Hutchison Parkway.

Caption Lady Liberty cypress tree

Joe Burbank / Orlando Sentinel

A scrawled message on the boardwalk in front of the 2,000-year-old Lady Liberty cypress tree, Thursday, August 20, 2015, at Big Tree Park in Longwood. The tree is considered to be among the oldest in the world.

The 2,000-year-old Lady Liberty cypress tree towers over Anthony Barbera of Apopka, with his kids Jayden,6, and Abriella, 10, Thursday, August 20, 2015, during their visit to Big Tree Park in Longwood. The tree is considered to be among the oldest in the world.

Because of her stamina, a group of arborists from Copemish, Mich., proposes to clone the giant tree to create up to 100 genetic replicas for preservation and replanting across the country.

Twenty of those clone trees would be given to Seminole County to be planted at area elementary schools.

If county commissioners approve the request Tuesday from Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, the nonprofit organization will move forward within the next six months of gently taking small cuttings of new growth from the top of the giant tree to start the cloning process.

Then, in about two years, new saplings will be ready for planting.

Scientists say champion trees such as Lady Liberty have stronger resistance to diseases, faster growth rates and sturdier structures. The cloned duplicates will likely have those same superior qualities.

"We believe that this tree is something special," said Jacob Milarch of Archangel. "Throughout time, it has seen droughts and disease. And over time it has acquired or developed the DNA to withstand those things."

Milarch's company, started by his father, has cloned hundreds of giant, ancient trees — including hemlocks, redwoods and sequoia — throughout the United States as an effort to "propagate the world's most important old-growth trees before they are gone," he said.

The cloning of ancient trees also helps to archive the plants' genetic material, or create "living libraries," he said.

Here's how the cloning process for Lady Liberty will work:

After the county's approval, three arborists will use ropes to "noninvasively" climb to near the top of the 89-foot tree. Cameramen at the base and drones flying overhead will film the event.

The climbers will then take several small cuttings, enough to fill a few plastic sandwich bags, before rappelling down.

On the ground, the cuttings will be cooled with ice and watered before being packaged and shipped overnight to Archangel's laboratory in Michigan.

In the lab, scientists will place the cuttings in a steroid solution to prod the cuttings into sprouting roots.

It's not the first attempt at cloning an ancient tree at Big Tree Park.

In 1998, three climbers scaled Lady Liberty's older and taller companion, The Senator, to remove cuttings to produce clones from that tree as part of the Florida Champion Tree Project.

The Senator was estimated to be about 3,500 years old in January 2012 when it went up in flames and collapsed. Sara Barnes told investigators that she set the blaze because it was dark, and she wanted to see the drugs she was using, according to court records.

She was sentenced last year to 250 hours of manual labor and fined nearly $14,000 in restitution.

Jim Duby, Seminole County's natural-lands program manager, said it's important to clone Lady Liberty before the tree's demise.

"Having what happened to The Senator, we cannot sit back and not do anything," he said.

That pleases Stephen Hamblin, a Geneva resident who helped bring forward the proposal to clone Lady Liberty.

"These trees — including Lady Liberty — are very special," he said. "I have a passion for trees, and I'm just happy to be a part of this."

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