The giant sequoia

BUT two species of the genus Sequoia carry on the noble line in these feeble times. Scions of a race whose ancestors extend into the depths of the ages, they seem to be not a part of this puny world. Gigantic in proportion, they are not unlike uncouth vestiges of another age when all things were molded on a monstrous scale. Numbering their years by thousands, they are an “unaccountable oversight” in a world where lives are limited to the psalmist’s span of years, and where there is no hope of gaining the length of days of Methuselah and his kin. Indeed, they appear to be more like mysterious strangers from some far star than solitary and lonely survivors in the midst of an unfamiliar new age. Patiently accepting the part of on-lookers, they disdain to take their place in the active ways of the world and continue to exist for no apparent reason other than to preserve the pristine glory of their ancestors lest it die with them and leave the coming years.

Rarest of all tree species, these two survivors are the Giant Sequoia, or Sequoia gigantea, and the Redwood, or Sequoia sempervirens. Both are impressive in the mystery that hangs over their history. But it is only this that they may be said to have in common. In almost every other respect they are quite dissimilar. True, the Giant Sequoia is a grander and more massive edition of the Redwood. However, the former puts the latter in the shade as to girth, while the latter dwarfs the former as to height. The Big Tree is unexceeded among trees in girth; the Redwood probably outstrips all trees of the world in height. Rarely does the Big Tree lift its towering column of verdure more than 280 feet into the heavens. Yet it attains an amazing trunk diameter of 20 to 27 feet well above its immense swollen base. The Redwood seldom produces a trunk more than 15 feet in diameter and the average of the larger trees range from 8 to 12 feet. Trees 280 feet high are not altogether uncommon. Some even wave their evergreen crowns 340 dizzy feet above the ground—truly a prodigious altitude for living shafts of wood to attain.

The Big Tree keeps its youth longer than any known tree and for this reason is acclaimed the oldest living thing. Frequently it reaches as great an age as 2,500 years. A few Giant Sequoias are known to have passed their three thousandth year. Seemingly, this figure fails to convey a satisfactory comprehension of the magnitude of such a great age to the minds of popular writers. As a consequence, the age of this grand tree has suffered unpardonable padding. Nevertheless, such estimates are not conclusive and rest only on the speculative notions of fanciful writers. The Redwood, on the other hand, while quite noteworthy in longevity in the tree world, scarcely sees a thousand summers. It must yield the palm in all honor to its greater cousin which ranks first in age of all the worthies of the tree kingdom, and, hence, in the world of living things.

The Sequoia sempervirens is one of the most consummately beautiful of trees. Its beauty is as rare and undefinable as the blue on the mountains in the hour of twilight, as startling and lovely as a flower-clad April, as charming and delightful as the notes of a melody that the winds bear away. And yet beauty is its least perfection. All the cheerful gayety, the contented peacefulness, the warm companionship that are the chief glory of other trees, the Redwood, too, possesses. It is one of the most lovable and friendly of trees. But there is nothing rough or common about it, nothing coarse or voluptuous. To know it is to know something that is genuine. To admire it is to be unable to look upon it with the cold eye of a judge, but with the reverence of a worshipper and the veneration of a child.

The Sequoia gigantea is formidable and sombre in aspect and very often terrible to look upon. Impassive, unapproachable, uncommunicative, it is the very autocrat of the forest. Godlike in physiognomy, at times it is impossible to understand. It has a loftiness of port, a dignity of bearing, a sublimity of energy that command attention and win their way insensibly into the soul. Its nature is as hard and flinty as the granite of the mountainside. But in spite of all this highmightiness there is something forlorn and pathetic, something sad and benign about it. All who know the pathos in memories of days that are accomplished and faces that have vanished will realize how replete this tree is with sadness and tenderness. Grand though it is in the religious solemnity and silence that rest upon it there is something pathetic about its very loneliness that resembles sadness as mist resembles the rain. Assuredly, if the Sequoia sempervirens is the most lively and cheerful of trees, the Sequoia gigantea is the saddest and the grandest.

If the Redwood be considered Grecian in its glory, the Giant Sequoia is Roman in its grandeur. Both produce forests of giants. In one beauty and grace held splendid court; in the other greatness and magnificence. The one is Grecian in its idealism, so divine in its loftiness as to exert an elevating and ennobling influence, and so fine in its perfection of form as to epitomize this immortal quality of Athenian genius; the other is Roman in its invincible strength, so imposing in its stolidity and massiveness as to embarrass its beholders, and so baffling in its superiority as to thrill them with awe and fill them with wonder. One is an emblem of eternal youth, ever sprouting Phoenix-like from its ruins and pressing with youthful vigor upon the faltering footsteps of its mouldering sires, exempt, like the immortal influence of Greece, from mutability and decay; the other is an emblem of permanence, a form of endurance standing among the temporary shapes of time, a structure not unlike a Roman pile, built to withstand the onslaught of the ages.

Today both species of Sequoia are confined to the mountains of California. They inhabit the western slopes of its two systems of mountains, the Coast Range on the West and the Sierra Nevada on the East. The former parallels the ocean; the latter forms the backbone of the State. Enclosed between these mountain chains lies the great valley of California—a vast, oval plain, scarred all over with grain fields and orchards, and mottled with shadows from the drifting sky squadrons—with its two central rivers, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin, meeting in its center and flowing with tranquil deliberation through a series of bays, on through the Golden Gate to the Pacific.

In comparison with the vast distribution of the genus during Miocene times these two surviving species now occupy a mere fragment of territory. The Redwood is restricted solely to the coastal mountains; the Big Tree obtains only in the Sierras. Together, by reason of the lofty height of the coast species and the gigantic girth of the Sierra species, they comprise a group of conifers unrivaled the world over. Since they are found nowhere else, California rightfully merits John Muir’s claim of being the “Paradise of Conifers.”

The Sequoia sempervirens forms a tolerably uninterrupted belt along the seaward side of the Coast Range. This belt is approximately 450 miles long and extends from just beyond the northern California border-line, where it fades out noticeably, south to the bay of Monterey. The maximum width of the Redwood belt is thirty miles and reaches from nearly sea level to an altitude of 3,000 feet. In the vicinity of Crescent City the Redwood approaches the ocean so closely that its tiny cones scatter their minute seeds about the cliffs upon which the wild waves of the Pacific beat. In the hot interior valleys that lie parched and shimmering under summer suns—valleys that are moistened only occasionally by winter rains, conditions are apparently too unfavorable to permit of its growth, and the tree is absent. It thrives only where the fog-laden atmosphere hovers about its crown. Its feathery arms seem to drink in these hazy, lazy mists as if by magic and to precipitate them into gentle showers. Along the river flats frequented by sea fogs, where the soil and environment are ideal, it attains its greatest development. Indeed, on the bottom lands of the Smith River and the main fork of the Eel in Humboldt and Del Norte Counties, the Redwood “completely monopolizes the soil and forms virgin forests of the heaviest stands of timber in the world.” “Stands,” according to Jepson in his monumental Silva of California, “of 125 to 150 thousand feet, board measure, to the acre are not uncommon. Instances of even two and one-half million board feet to the acre are on record, while 480 thousand feet, not including waste, have been taken out of a single tree.” When it is realized that good eastern forests produce but ten thousand board feet to the acre, this statement is striking. In fact, such an immense yield separates the Redwood from all the timber trees of the globe.

The Sequoia gigantea is more limited in its range than its fog-loving cousin. Its belt is but 250 miles long and extends from the middle of the American River, near Lake Tahoe, to Deer Creek in Tulare County. It is found in the verdant center of the coniferous belt along the middle heights of the Sierra. This zone of finest vegetation is located between the altitudes of 4,600 to 8,000 feet above the sea where the environment insures the most nearly perfect conditions for tree life; where heat is tempered by elevation and the cold of winter is modified by the proximity of a great sunlit valley. The area covered by the Big Tree, however, fails to equal a hundredth part of that which the Redwood occupies. This is due to the fact that the Giant Sequoia does not occur in an uninterrupted belt. Unlike the Redwood, generally speaking, it congregates in groves. Single trees are rarely found alone in solitary grandeur. Preferring the society of its fellows, the Big Tree is almost always found in “family clusters.” Though mingling with Sugar and Yellow Pine, with White Fir and Incense Cedar, these Sequoian groves never lose their identity. The size of the individual Sequoias and their concentration within a definite area are sufficient to set them conspicuously apart from the general forest.

Twenty-six of these scattered patches of forest giants sociably growing with trees of shorter pedigree and lesser dignity have been enumerated by Jepson. These groves logically form a northern and a southern group, with the Kings River as the line of division. The northern portion of the Giant Sequoia belt has so diminished in size that it consists of but seven small groves so widely separated that three of the gaps between them are from thirty to forty miles in width. The northernmost group must be called a “grove” by courtesy, since it contains but six trees half of which are less than three feet in diameter. The southernmost, with the exception of the Fresno Grove, is the most remarkable of the northern group. This is the famous Mariposa Grove. In all these northern patches, the Sequoia is an epicure of climate and site. It grows only in locally favored or protected spots where the sunshine is abundant and the soil rich, deep, and moist.

The southern groves mark an almost continuous line through the majestic, trackless forests of pine and fir from the Kings River southward to Deer Creek. The gaps in the belt gradually become increasingly narrow, and then cease altogether. The Sequoia may be said to extend across the wide basin of the Kaweah and Tule Rivers in noble forests broken only by deep, yawning canyons with rivers threading their sinuous way down the center of each. Here, too, the belt widens out, extending from the granite promontories overlooking the fading line of tawny foothills to within sight of the summit peaks—regions of rock and ice lifted above the limit of life. The largest and most famous of these forests is the Giant Forest located near the mouth of the Marble Fork of the Kaweah River and within the confines of the Sequoia National Park. This most wonderful of all American forests was named by John Muir, who must have wept for joy when he stumbled upon it. Thousands of trees are congregated in this forest, five thousand of which are said to be veritable titans in size. It possesses, also, the largest tree in the world, the General Sherman, which has a diameter of 36.5 feet and a height of 280 feet—measurements which easily entitle it to wear the purple of the King of all trees.

In this glorious forest the Sequoia is indifferent alike to exposure and soil, and is found growing in profusion on slopes of every character, some even clinging to life on bare granite surfaces in a way wonderful to behold. Multitudes of tender seedlings are continually springing up in moist, sunny openings to carry on the royal line, and companies of slender saplings are eagerly crowding up every slope deserted by their elders, crowning all save the highest eminences. In fact, the marvelous bounty of Nature has produced here the finest assemblage of conifers known to botanical science. The entire region is a billowy sea of evergreens, sinking and rising with the undulations of the land with an unfailing luxuriance, the great rounded domes of the giants swelling above the verdant canopy of pines and firs to mark where the Sequoias sweep along the ridges, rise out of deep canyons, or encamp on sunny meadows in conclave grand and solemn.