The "Big Tree" - Forest King
- Donald Culross Peattie (1950)

Oldest and mightiest of living things is the giant sequoia or California "big tree." After thirty centuries of growth Sequoia gigantea is practically a geological phenomenon. Only its closest kin, the redwood of the California coast ranges, approaches it in longevity and girth.

The home of the giant sequoia lies between six thousand and eight thousand feet altitude on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. There, snow drifts among the titans up to thirty feet deep-a mere white anklet to such trees. The summers are dry; if rain does fall it is likely to come with violent thunderstorms and lightning bolts that have been seen to rive a sequoia from crown to roots. Those who know the species best say that it never dies of disease or senility. If it survives predation in its infancy and fire in youth, only a bolt from heaven will end its centuries of life.

To see the "big trees" you must travel far and climb high. It is a day's run by car from San Francisco or Los Angeles. Your car engine will be boiling and it will be dusk, no doubt, by the time you reach the giant groves. And the forest will be still, yet watchfully alive. A deer may put an inquisitive black muzzle in your outheld hand. It will be a long moment before you realize that the vast shadow behind the little doe is not shade but a tree trunk so gigantic that you cannot com-prehend at first that this is a living thing. Were a cross-section of that great bole put down in a city street, it would block it from kerb to kerb. That mighty bough, the lowest one, is still so high above the ground that it would stretch out over the top of a twelve-story building. If it were cut off and stood in the ground, that bough would appear as a tree seventy feet high and seven feet in diameter at the base. The "big tree's" crown is as lost to accurate measurement as your head is to a beetle at your shoe.

Yet the trees conceal their true gigantism by the very perfection of proportion. Each part - breadth at base, spread of boughs, thickness of trunk, shape of crown - is in calm Doric harmony with the rest.

On second view, by morning light, the impres-sion of the giant sequoias is not so much of out-size as of colour. The ruddy trunks are richly bright. The metallic green of the foliage is the gayest of all Sierra conifers. Unlike the misty dimness of the redwood groves with their over-arching canopy, the sunlight here reaches right to the floor. Instead of the hush of the redwoods, you hear among the "big trees" the lordly racket of the pileated woodpeckers at their irreverent carpentry. The Douglas squirrels frisk familiarly up the monstrous boles and out upon the boughs, to cut the cones and despoil them of their seeds.

The General Sherman is usually considered the all-round exemplary giant sequoia. It is two hundred and seventy-three feet high, has a basal circumference of more than one hundred and two feet; at sixteen feet above the ground it is better than twenty-four feet in diameter, and raises a clean shaft, clear of any boughs, for a height of a hundred and thirty feet. In the Calaveras North Grove lies prone the tree called Father of the Forest; inside its hollow trunk a man once rode horseback without having to bend his head. Though the crown of this tree is gone, the taper of the trunk indicates that the Father of the forest stood four hundred feet high-which would have made it the tallest tree in the world.

The "big trees" of Calaveras North Grove were discovered one spring day in 1852 by a miner, who pursued a grizzly bear far up into tall timber. When he encountered the "big trees," his astonish-ment was so great that he allowed the bear to get away. His fellow miners came, incredulous, and beheld fifty acres of what we now call the Calaveras North Grove, covered with trees as tall as three hundred and twenty-five feet.

In 1853 John Lindley, an English botanist, in a formal botanical publication named the mighty conifer Wellingtonia gigantea after the Duke of Wellington, who had died the previous autumn. But the generic name of Sequoia for the coast red-woods had been published in Germany six years before, and it was soon realized that the "big trees" too are sequoias. The name had been bestowed in honour of Sequoyah, the great Cherokee chief who devoted his life to developing an Indian alphabet and teaching others to read it.

In the early fifties a disappointed gold-seeker, G. H. Woodruff of New York, collected seeds from the "big tree" cones in an empty snuff-box and paid twenty-five dollars to send them east by pony express to the nursery firm of Ellwanger & Barry at Rochester, New York. From those seeds sprang up four thousand tiny trees. They did not sell very well in eastern America, but in England where they were retailed as Wellingtonias they sold rapidly. Botanical gardens in England, France and Germany wanted specimens. Soon every man of wealth or title thought he must have a specimen for his grounds. ""The great event of the year 1864," wrote Tennyson's son, "was the visit of Garibaldi to the Tennysons, an incident of which was the planting of a Wellingtonia by the great Italian." Eventually Ellwanger & Barry paid Woodruff over a thousand dollars as his share in the profits on a snuff-boxful of seeds.

Californians, unabashed in the claims they made for their state, asserted that the "big trees" were old when the pyramids were a-building. John Muir counted the annual rings on the biggest stump he ever saw and claimed he had found over four thousand. But accurate ring counts in recent times have not put the age of any logged tree at more than three thousand one hundred years.

Yet thirty centuries of life are awe-inspiring. There is something comforting about handling a section of sequoia wood that seems scarcely less living now than when it grew before the time of Christ. Somewhere about two inches inside the bark of a tree recently cut will be the rings laid down a century ago. And those particular rings may be fifteen feet from the centre of the tree, the starting point of its growth.

Why, out of a world of trees, do these live longest? If there is any one answer, it lies in the very sap of life itself. The sap of the "big trees" is non-resinous, hence only slightly inflammable. Though fire is a deadly peril to the thin-barked young sequoias, when bark has formed on the old specimens it may be a foot or more thick and practically as fire-resistant as asbestos. The only way that fire can penetrate is when some more inflammable tree falls as a brand against a giant sequoia and, fanned to a blow-torch by the moun-tain wind, sears its way through to the wood. Even then fire seems never to consume a great old specimen. The repair of fire damage begins at once, even if the wound is so wide that it would take a thousand years to cover it. The high tannin content of the sap has the same healing action that tannic acid has on our flesh when we apply it to a burn. More, it is highly antiseptic, deadly to the spores of infecting fungus growth.

A giant sequoia waits a hundred and seventy-five or two hundred years before it first flowers, perhaps the most delayed sexual maturity in all nature. When it comes, the trees are loaded with millions of male and female conelets from Novem-ber to late in February. A single tree will bear hundreds of thousands of cones when in the full vigour of its life.

The flaky seed which produces all these tons of vegetation is so small that it takes three thousand of them to make one ounce. There are from ninety-six to three hundred and four seeds to a cone, and the cones themselves are almost ridiculously small -hardly larger than big leather buttons. They do not mature until the end of the second season and not till the end of the third, at the earliest, do they open their scales in dry weather and loose the seeds which drift but a little way from the parent tree. Perhaps only fifteen per cent of the seeds have the vitality to sprout. And long before they do they are attacked by squirrels and jays. Many are lost in the duff of the forest floor. Of a million seeds on a tree in autumn, perhaps only one is destined to sprout when the snow water and the sun of the late mountain spring touch it with quickening fingers.

The tiny seedlings are attacked from below by cutworms, above by armies of black wood ants. Ground squirrels and chipmunks, finches and sparrows cock a bright eye at them and pull them up for a toothsome salad. Deer browse them by the thousands. If a seedling survives its first year, it may face the centuries with some confidence.

All the properties of sequoia wood save one are inferior to those of nearly every other timber tree. It is so brittle that when a big tree falls to earth the green timber often cracks both lengthwise and across, into fragments fit only for lead pencils. Its only virtue is that it lasts for ever. In consequence, it was sought by lumbermen for shingles, water-channels, fence stakes and poles.

The giant groves seemed to promise ready for-tunes. So logging railways were hurried up the mountains, mills were set up, and the lumberjacks fell to work. In this wise was accomplished the destruction of the Converse Basin grove, prob-ably finer than any now standing, and the slaughter went on till there remained here but a single great specimen. This the superintendent spared in order that it might be named after himself, the Boole tree. Today in the Converse Basin there is not one seedling sequoia to give hope that this species will ever grow there again. Instead there are thousands of logs that were never utilized, because they proved too big or too costly to handle, millions of board feet gone to waste because the wood smashed to bits in its fall. The whole ghastly enterprise ended in financial failure.

The long battle to save the "big trees" was begun by Colonel George W. Stewart, a California newspaper editor. He was joined by other public-spirited citizens, and in 1890 the first of a series of sequoia national parks was created. Thus the future of the king of trees seems assured.