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You have been out of town, or seriously distracted with other things, if you don't know by now that the Hollow Tree in Stanley Park is coming down later this spring.

One thousand years and surely 10 times that many souvenir photographs, and a genuine Vancouver icon will be no more.

Or, perhaps not quite "no more." The city has announced that the tree may be bisected and laid out so that its 60-foot circumference can still be admired. They also think they might plant a new red cedar on the same spot.

Talk about iconic. Future visitors won't merely stand near what was once a really big tree. They will enter a shrine to the whole idea of cedar trees as they relate to that site: complete with holy remains, multi-megapixel observances, even the reverent suggestion of a sapling future.

I am sympathetic to the underlying impulse here, having spent man-years obsessively trolling the park's nether reaches myself. And I have my own set of iconic images, my family's first photographs in the city, taken right there in the 400-hectare soul of this town.

Still, the Hollow Tree saga does make me reflect on a broader impression I have that our affection for the wilderness has changed in revealing ways over the past decades. I draw on the photographic record - available in city archives, as well as in the online catalogues of vintage postcard sellers - as evidence of this evolving social reality.

Until 20 years ago, the Hollow Tree seems never to have been photographed without a person present; leaning on it, staring up its empty interior, stretching their arms to suggest its size. Or parking their vehicles inside it: horses, teams of horses, little cars, larger cars, bicycles.

This seemed to have really captured the zeitgeist for a long time. What's the most interesting way we could pose in the cramped and surprisingly evacuated interior of a tree? People apparently asked themselves this question over and over for the better part of 75 years and reliably came up with the same answer: sitting in the things that we normally drive on the road! In a day when the city was still being cleared, when roads and 1,000-year-old trees were in active conflict, I suppose this made a certain amount of sense.

But in the early days, people also didn't smile much in portrait photographs. As a result, in those early car-in-tree shots, they tend to look as if they've just hunted the Hollow Tree down and killed it themselves. Reservedly satisfied, but aware that other trees might be lying in wait.

Later, as film became Kodachrome familiar, lots of grins are in the archive. Look, my motorcycle is in a tree! I sense a hint of the future in these shots, a bashful sort of cheekiness. As if the first awareness of human infraction were dawning.

By the Hollow Tree's final year (I'll unscientifically hazard), more shots were taken of the tree alone than of people standing in it or affectionately patting its flanks. Nature has become a rebuke to us, on many levels. We are pinioned by guilt about global warming and the desecration of our pristine landscapes, the depletion of our resources and the extinction of species. So we stand back before this enormous thing. Our lenses dip and rise in genuflection. The shutter whispers.

And no wonder, in this context, that people grieved following the storm during the Winter of 2006, that voices were raised in opposition to the removal of the Hollow Tree, even after it was blown 10 degrees over in a storm, and burnt in an electrical fire. Even though, left as it was, there was a real chance it might topple over and terminally flatten someone approaching it for absolution.

Still, I paid my final respects last Thursday. I took my boy and the dog. Cars were pulling up and parking all the time we were there, people piling out and taking their last photographs. A woman told me that her dad used to park his English Hillman car inside the tree. Another woman just told me how she would miss it. But people were smiling.

I walked away up into the trails that carve through the recently thinned out woods near Prospect Point. My boy ran ahead through the sunlight, which now reaches in, even when the sun is very low, to light the forest's deepest reaches. And as he reached the corner, he stopped and pointed up. He said: "Look!" It was a tree. A very tall one, 100 feet at least and all alone in its new clearing. My son, who is 4, and who has an extensive network of imaginary friends, announced to me, "Fox says that's the tallest tree in the world."

Then off he skipped up the gravel, casting a shadow that must have been 6½ feet tall.