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Key to Species — Part 8

A. Leaves minute, ovate, usually compressed, buds naked; fruit biennial. (S. Wellingtonia) BIG TREE

AA. Leaves mostly linear, or lanceolate, spreading, 2-ranked; buds scaly; fruit annual. (S. sempervirens) REDWOOD

The Big Tree (Sequoia Wellingtonia, Seem.)--A pyramidal tree when young, becoming round-topped; 275 to 325 feet high; diameter 20 to 35 feet; fluted trunk. Bark reddish brown, fibrous, fluted; 1 to 2 feet thick. Wood red, soft, coarse, light, weak, durable. Buds naked. Leaves ovate, acuminate, spreading at tips, 1/2 inch long. Flowers: monoecious, terminal, conical, scaly, profuse in late winter; staminate with broad scales and abundant pollen; pistillate with 25 to 40 needle-tipped scales, with 3 to 7 ovules under each. Fruit dark red-brown woody cone, biennial, 2 to 3 1/2 inches long, with thickened tips; seeds 3 to 7 under each scale, each 2-winged, small, light, eaten by squirrels. Preferred habitat, rich woodlands. Distribution, narrow area on western slope of Sierras in California. Uses: Most majestic tree in the world. Rare and dwarfed in cultivation. Lumber used for shingles, fencing and in general construction.

Sir Joseph Hooker and Asa Gray sat with John Muir around a campfire on Mount Shasta, and talked about the great forests of the Sierras they had just visited. Comparing them with Old-World forests, they agreed upon this statement: "In the beauty and grandeur of individual trees, and in number and variety of species, the Sierra forests surpass all others." Conifers are supreme in these forests and among conifers Sequoia is king. Of the two species, the Big Tree, S. Wellingtonia, stands first, and the redwood second.

The Old World has some trees of surprising girth and indefinite age--oaks, chestnuts, sycamores, and cedars of Lebanon--each with its history, the pride of the country it grows in. But these trees are derelicts--throwing out a wisp of foliage here and there, a truce to death, with each returning spring. The lime tree of Nurnberg and the chestnut at the foot of Mount AEtna are each famous; but these trees, with their tops dead and gone years before they were pronounced dead, their trunks honeycombed with decay, and leaning upon props and pillars, are scarcely to be compared with trees, hale, lusty-crowned, whose fluted trunks are a unit, and sound as a nut from the heart out. Granting a greater girth, if you please, to a few of these senile trees, and a greater height to one Eucalyptus that grows in Australia, we can truthfully declare that, excepting these, the Sequoias lead the world, past and present, in height and calibre. No other tree combines such massiveness of trunk with such height. And there is no doubt but that in age they can take rank with the oldest, for competent authorities estimate the age limit to be above 5,000 years. Muir thinks that some living trees have reached that age. Stumps now standing show 4,000 annual rings.

It would be great good fortune to visit one of the ten groves of Big Trees once a month and so get the story of the tree's life as the year rolls around. In the late winter the flowers appear, showering the whole region with their golden dust, and tipping the sprays with the pale green fertile flowers by thousands. The cones that follow are small for such a tree, and each scale bears from four to eight seeds at its base. Millions of them are scattered each year, thin, little winged discs, no larger than a baby's thumbnail, looking like half-grown elm seeds. It is incredible that such a tree should have come from such a seed. Not only have they vitality, but some store of nutriment, for the squirrels journey up the trees and cut off the cones in order to put away for winter the little seeds they contain. If fresh cones are falling, you may be sure the squirrels are at work, for the trees hold their empty cones for years.

It is strange that with such profuse seed production young trees are so scarce in the Big Tree groves. Only in the southern range of this species do seedling trees appear to reassure us that the race will preserve itself, if only the three agencies of destruction, the axe, the saw and the forest fire, can be curbed.

The tourist, hurrying through the Sequoia National Park, gets very little but an awed sense of the magnificence of these trees. It is worth while to have had the glimpse his limited ticket permits. Big stories told by friends who had been there before, actual dimensions of noted trees, and all the guide-book extravagance of description, have not prepared him for the things he sees. He is speechless with astonishment. He walks across an ample platform which is the flat top of a Sequoia stump. He sleeps, perchance, in a house which is a hollow log. He rides in a coach and four through a tunnel over which a standing trunk arches, like a mighty occidental Colossus of Rhodes. He lifts a fragment of bark, and it is 2 feet thick. It took three long weeks of steady labour for two men to cut down one tree!