The giant sequoia

WHEN that intrepid botanist-explorer, David Douglas, who in his lonely wanderings along the Pacific endured numberless hardships that he might make the flowers and trees of the coast known to science, first saw the Redwoods while traveling through the Santa Cruz forest in 1830, they invoked in him feelings of the most profound awe. He hesitated to describe them lest he fall into discredit among his friends in England. “New and strange things seldom fail to make strong impressions,” he wrote in his Journal, “and are therefore frequently over-rated. This tree gives the mountains a most peculiar, I was going to say, awful appearance—something which plainly tells me that we are not in Europe.”

Little did this awestruck wanderer know that yet larger trees stood in these princely forests of the Western world. In fact, almost a quarter century elapsed before the presence of the Giant Sequoia was made known. John Bidwell has sometimes been accredited their discovery in 1841. But the more acceptable and authoritative record of discovery is that of A. T. Dowd who, while hunting, came quite by accident upon the Calaveras Grove eleven years later. Even then Dowd’s story was accepted with much doubt and it was necessary to resort to a ruse in order to induce even a few skeptical workmen to confirm the discovery. Still the truth of David Douglas’ moralizing on the over-rating of strong impressions asserted itself, and traveler after traveler had his reputation for truthfulness sorely tried until almost a “convention of naturalists” had seen the mammoth tree and given their unanimous testimony as to its size. Then the great Sequoia became an almost meteoric celebrity, for few plants have attracted as much attention in so short a period of time. Since then the Sequoia has been lauded in every land as the largest and most nobly proportioned of trees. It has found its way sometimes in a most engaging manner into literature. For instance, in Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea, an old seaman who had gathered from his voyages many wonderful stories, tells a child of a hollow tree in California “so vast that a man on horseback could ride one hundred paces inside.”

Yet the prodigious size of the Sierra Sequoia is hardly as wonderful as its remarkable age. That it should become known as the oldest living thing that human eyes can look upon is truly marvelous.

The elements to which the Sequoia is indebted for its great age are as enigmatic as they are controversial. Foremost of these is the tree’s intense desire to live. It seems never weary with the weight of years, and is blessed with a tenacity, a faith in life granted to no other living thing. From the finely interlaced network of its shallow root system to the utmost tip of every tiny needle, it displays a fervent love of life.[4] Indeed, there is a joy in noting the eager attitude of the foliage as it stretches out toward the light to gather the sunshine. Every unnecessary and useless branch is promptly discarded and the entire energy of the tree is devoted toward putting forth new foliage the better to capture the sunbeams.

The altitude in which the Sequoia grows produces the loveliest verdure of the Sierras. All seems submersed in an ocean of sunlight. It is a region lifted above the thirsty foothills and yet far enough below the vacant solitudes of perpetual ice and naked rock to be free from the searing heat and dust of the former and the tragedy and wreck of the latter. John Muir so delighted in the “glorious floods of light” that pervaded this region that he referred to the Sierra, not as the snowy range, but the “Range of Light.”

This abundance of sunshine, then, helps to explain the splendid conifers that the middle heights of the Sierra produce. The amount of solar heat sensibly affects the growth of trees. It is in the presence of sunlight that the green coloring matter in leaves is able to digest plant food. Yet this is not the all-important factor. Moisture plays a most potent role, also. The distribution of the lingering patches of the Sequoia reveals the powerful influence of moisture over the Big Tree. In the northern limits of its range, the Sequoia exists at a lower altitude (4,500 feet) where moisture is plentiful, while in the southern portion of the belt it climbs nearer the summit peaks (7,000 feet) where the drying heat of the San Joaquin plains is modified by elevation. The inexorable force exerted by moisture over the Sequoia is even better demonstrated by individual trees. All the better specimens are found growing in well watered places. Springs often bubble forth from the wide-spread masses of sponge-like Sequoian roots, indicative of the constant underground irrigation system that supplies the tree with mineral nutriment. The stunted are nearly always found growing in the dryer spots, looking very rusty but resolute; the thrifty tower about boggy meadows or along the drainage of water courses whose waters roar in their channels in flood time and trickle from pool to pool with faint murmur in Autumn after the azalea has bloomed and the mountain lilac has lost its badge of Spring.

Indeed, it would be difficult to conceive a tree that has established a more adequate and harmonious relationship in concordance with both climate and soil. Under the most constant stimulus of the elements so vital to the growth of trees in general, the Sequoia is sustained by soil, deep and rich, by sunshine, and by moisture, as well as by the other elements which it, in common with other associated trees, derives from the air. Nevertheless, the sugar pine often enjoys such idyllic conditions, as do the silver fir and the incense cedar. Yet the Big Tree exceeds them all in size. Since it so outranks its fellows in girth and longevity, the Sequoia must, therefore, possess certain superior innate qualities that are found wanting in other trees.

Theoretically, there is no limit to the girth of trees. There is a limit, however, to the height of a column which Nature, working silently through centuries, builds. One theory holds that this limit is governed by the distribution of sap. When the tree attains a height beyond which its circulating fluids cannot rise, upward growth practically ceases and all appreciable growth is in girth. Since there are no limits to dilation, the tree is capable of indefinite expansion. Normally, however, counteracting causes which at first retard, then arrest, are continually at work, finally checking the progress of growth. The tree most completely free from such counteracting influences logically attains the greatest size and age.

This, then, is the keynote of the Sequoia’s great age. There is a limit to its height, but none, apparently, to its rotundity. So long as the growth of the Big Tree is unimpaired, it continues with patient, steady, indefatigable energy to add ring after ring to its stem year after year, century after century. In time the old channels become clogged with insoluble matter taken up by the roots and the annual layers become successively consolidated until the united cells attain such strength that the vast wooden pillar defies the onslaught of the elements. It stands a monument of power, emblematic of the limitless desire to live.

“Trees,” states Asa Gray in his famous essay on the Longevity of Trees, “far outlast all living things. They never die of old age, but only from injury or disease, or, in a word, from accidents. If not destroyed by accident, that is, by extrinsic causes—they do not eventually perish, like ourselves, from old age. It is commonly thought that they are fully exposed to the inevitable fate of all living things, but this springs from a false analogy which we have unconsciously established between plants and animals. This popular analogy might, perhaps, hold good if the tree were actually formed like the animal, all parts of which are created at once in their rudimentary state, and soon attain their fullest development so that the functions are carried on throughout life in the same set of organs. If this were the case of the tree it would likewise die sooner or later of old age.

“But the tree is an aggregate of many individuals united in a common trunk and why should not the aggregate, the tree, last indefinitely? To establish the proper analogy, we must not compare the tree with man, but with the coral formations in which numerous individuals, engrafted and blended on a common base, conspire to build up immense coral groves which have endured for ages; the inner and older parts consisting of the untenanted cells of individuals that have long since perished, while fresh structures are continually produced on the surface. The individuals, indeed, perish; but the aggregate may endure as long as time itself. So with the tree.

“Only the leaf may be said to die of old age. It lives but a single season and is the proper emblem of mortality. But the leaves are necessarily renewed every year, so are the other essential organs of the plant. It annually renews not only its buds and leaves, but its wood and its roots; everything, indeed, that is concerned with its life and growth.

“Though the wood in the center and large branches—the produce of buds and leaves that had long ago disappeared—may die and decay; yet, while new individuals are formed on the surface with each successive crop of fresh buds, and placed in as favorable communication with the soil and the air as their predecessors, the aggregate, the tree, would appear to have no necessary, no inherent limit to its existence.”

Of the many chapters of evidence gathered by this American botanist on the remarkable age of certain trees, none made mention of trees older than the Sequoia. The ancient oak which cost the poets much mental toil in their panegyrics to its strength and endurance falls far short of the Sequoia in age; nor do the lordly Cedars of Lebanon, “from which the sacred writers derived so many noble images,” nor the venerable yews, “whose branches were used by our pagan ancestors to deck the graves of the dead as the emblem of immortality,” exceed it in years. The Mexican cypress may have witnessed the rise and fall of the Aztec Empire, but they are not coeval with the Christian era that has seen the decay and death of a score of empires. Sengal Baobabs and Teneriffe Dragon Trees may be reputed to be the “most ancient living monuments in the world,” but they do not antedate Solomon’s time.

Since no tree, apparently, surpasses the Sequoia in longevity it must enjoy an immunity from the causes that take off other trees. Ordinarily, weakness in trees results from a diminution of resistance and rejuvenating power, or a loss of vitality. The protecting bark is often lacerated and stripped away through accident, creating wounds through which insects gain easy entrance to carry on their insidious work. Fire often exposes the tender tissues in which the spores of fungi find lodgment and breed disease. Instances of the death of trees through these causes are legion throughout the forests of the Sierra. The magnificent silver firs seldom live to see their three hundredth birth year, and though externally of sound and fair appearance, when cut they are not infrequently found to be a mass of watery, decayed wood inside. Through a loss of vitality the noble sugar pines likewise are often devoured by larvae soon after reaching maturity.

Yet strangely enough, the Sequoia appears untouched by the forces of decay. This tale of a struggle into being, of a life lived, of decay and death, is written on all of Nature’s works. The way of life and its destined end is toward oblivion. But causes that conspire to bring about the end of trees in general appear unable to quench the vitality within a Sequoia. It rarely ever shows the slightest evidence of weakness, and appears never to be defiled by the ravages of disease. Injuries only of the greatest magnitude are a source of irrecoverable loss. Indeed, Sequoias that have great holes burned in them are magnificent in their refusal to accept defeat. They summon their splendid resources, clutch the soil with a broader and deeper hold in their determination to enjoy life to the very last. So long as there is a sound root left, it is the way of a Sequoia to cling to life. No one who has an appreciation of the wonders of Nature can behold this grim, steadfast, dogged resolution that prevails against all odds without feeling the beauty of such an unconquerable spirit.

The wood of the Sequoia seems to be provided with every refinement of durability. Natural decomposition is slow and its wood wastes away insensibly like granite. So resistant is it to weather, to the rigorous and incessant forces of obliteration, that it is hardly an exaggeration to affirm “that a log cabin built of Giant Sequoia logs on granite will last as long as its foundation.” The resinous matters that pervade wood are considered a preservative against decay. Hardwood has always been indicative of durability, whereas the wood of the Sequoia is soft and brittle. But for all its softness and lack of resin, though hoary and mossy with age, and deformed by centuries of violent storms, the Sequoia is nearly always sound from the sapwood to the center, and this is more than can be said of nearly all the “remarkable and curious cases” of trees that have enjoyed a great longevity as cited by Asa Gray.

Most impressive of the excellent qualities of the Sequoia, however, is its amazing vitality. In the ability to recover from accident it is probably excelled by no other tree. The shadows of twenty centuries may sleep beneath its boughs, yet its growing power is as active as ever, the tree ever rallying in apparent youthful vigor to replace its broken, tempest-tossed crown. It defies even the wrath of heaven. Though lightning may shatter a pine to splinters, it can but knock off fifty feet, more or less, of a Sequoia’s crown. Never has it been known to have destroyed a Sequoia outright. “Thousands of years the Sequoia stands offering its head to every passing cloud as if praying for heaven’s fire as a blessing,” observed John Muir. “Then when the old head is off, every bud and branch becomes excited like a colony of bees that have lost their queen, and tries hard to repair the damage. Branches that for centuries have grown out horizontally at once begin to turn upward and all the branchlets arrange themselves with reference to a new top of the same ineffably fine contour as the old one. And curious enough, all very old Sequoias have lost their crowns in this manner. Of all living things, they seem to be the only ones able to wait long enough to be struck by lightning.”

The power of a Sequoia to heal an immense fire scar is another noteworthy manifestation of its vitality. Its resistance to fire is almost incredible. Its massive, unresinous bark offers an almost asbestos-like exterior to the eternal antagonist of the forest. Its wood, too, is so non-resinous in character that it burns with marked sluggishness, and it is only after repeated attacks by fire that the wood will be consumed.

Even when fire has made serious inroads the Sequoia refuses to be discouraged. It musters all its energy and attempts to heal the burned area by extending the living tissue over the blackened wound and reuniting the broken circle of its cambium layer. This healing occurs in a rhythmical and pulsating manner accompanying the seasons, beginning along the margins of the burned area. Each year the layer of new wood-tissue encroaches slowly and patiently upon the injured area, diminishing the charring until the two opposite folds touch one another. In a few years the bark is pinched out and once more the annual layers become continuous around the tree. The wound is healed, and as the centuries pass it recedes deeper and deeper within the heart of the tree, unchanged and never a source of decay.

The late Dr. Dudley examined the stump of a lumbered Sequoia in the Converse Basin which registered the effects of great forest fires. He found the tree to be 2,171 years old when cut down. At the age of 516 years the tree suffered its first burn, acquiring a scar three feet in width. One hundred and five years were required to heal the injury. A second burn occurred when the tree was 1,712 years old, making two wounds, one twelve inches in width, the other two feet. One hundred and thirty-nine years passed before these scars were covered. Then, when the tree came to be 2,068 years old, a tremendous conflagration burned a great scar eighteen feet wide and thirty feet high. This was still unhealed when the tree was cut down. Professor Dudley estimated that at the rate of the above healing it would require at least four centuries and a half to repair the result of the injury done by this last forest fire.

No other tree could have lived under similar circumstances without becoming diseased or decayed. This greatest among trees stands alone in its superb resistance to insect and fungi attack, and this, coupled with a marvelous recuperative power, enables it to withstand injuries of such considerable magnitude, and to endure long enough to recover from them. Its vitality, as deep as it is tenacious, and its very love for living, vest it with this sublime power. Symbol of an unconquered will, the Sequoia has caught more of the immortal than any other living thing. The Gordian Knot of its existence would never be cut were it possible to protect it for all time from fire and the axe. Had it remained untouched by flames of the past, the vastly shrunken present-day habitat of this great tree might possibly contain the ragged rear guards of the departed giants of the Miocene, and a single Sequoia would be old enough to establish a paleontological era.