WORDS CAN hardly convey the awe inspired by a big, old tree, let alone a 460-year-old white oak about 100 feet tall and 32 feet around. It seems almost inconceivable that something so temporal as a thunderstorm -- however violent -- could topple the Wye Oak, the largest of its species in the nation and one of the country's best-known trees.

This massive being, its base buttressed by concrete, its limbs laced by cables, had survived it all, the forces of nature and history, for almost five centuries. When high winds brought it down across Route 662 in Talbot County on Thursday, many Marylanders lost not only a historic symbol but a piece of themselves.

Over the years, legions of the state's schoolchildren were escorted to the small state park created around the Wye Oak to contemplate the state's oldest living being, its magnificent crown and the relentless but unfathomable nature of time. Could anything else teach that so well?

In the end, this great tree -- though still impressive -- was decidedly weakened from spreading rot inside. So to everything there is a season, even if it's half a millennium.

Thankfully, the Wye Oak survived long enough that it spawned some heirs. In recent years, scientists, using new grafting methods, produced 30 genetic clones -- the first of which were planted just six weeks ago at, appropriately, Mount Vernon, Va.

Now, this fallen champion will produce more offspring. It will be a long time -- hundreds of years -- before these thin saplings could aspire to rival their parent's longevity. Even so, it seems well worth the wait.