PORTLAND — The world’s smallest park has, once again, lost its lone tree.
Oregon Public Broadcasting reports a stump is all that remains in Portland’s 2-foot-wide Mill Ends Park. On Thursday afternoon, tourists, many of whom had put the pint-sized park on their things-to-see list, settled instead for selfies with a barren concrete planter.
Mill Ends, deemed the world’s smallest park by Guinness World Records, drew national attention six years ago when someone swiped the park’s lone sapling — only to drop it back off a few days later. The Douglas Fir was later replanted in Mount Tabor Park.
That will not be the case for the 2019 sapling, whose roots have been left in the concrete bed.
How long the stump has been there — and who sawed it — remains a mystery. The parks bureau’s spokesperson was on vacation Thursday. KOIN-TV last documented the sapling, decked out in garland and ornaments, on Dec. 16.
Parks bureau head of customer services Shawn Rogers said he did not know what happened to the tree but that in his 20 years on the job it was much more common for passersby to drop things off at the park than remove them.
