Redwood World – Pictures and Locations of Redwoods in the British Isles
redwoodworld.co.uk
redwoodworld.co.uk
A fallen redwood sprouted into a whole row of trees: http://www.redwoodworld.co.uk/picturepages/leighton.htm
I had no idea they could do that. Amazing!
> The redwood is one of the few conifers that sprout from the stump and roots, and it declares itself willing to begin immediately to repair the damage of the lumberman and also that of the forest-burner. As soon as a redwood is cut down or burned it sends up a crowd of eager, hopeful shoots, which, if allowed to grow, would in a few decades attain a height of a hundred feet, and the strongest of them would finally become giants as great as the original tree.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/the-ame...
It's very easy to take a drive anywhere in Northern CA and find plenty of places where the primary form of reproduction is sexual.
Specimen trees in public areas can be wonderful things, but the idea that humans can simply aesthetically rejig the natural world whenever it suits them deserves to die.
This is untrue. While it's correct to say that nature is involved in its own destructive churn, human interference in the natural world operates on a much faster timescale, over much greater distances, and with much more consistency. That's why humans are able to cause much more devastating ecological disasters than a natural process would - and why those disasters are qualitatively different from naturally-induced ones, since especially their speed means there is less "bounce back" to a new and equally active equilibrium.
> Perhaps the Giant Redwood is an ideal tree to re-introduce as we are told that our climate is beginning to return to these types of conditions.
One of the justifications for reintroduction of Redwoods is a real gem.
https://aeon.co/essays/who-chopped-down-britains-ancient-for...
"This understanding has now been shown to be wholly inaccurate. Much of England had been cleared as early as 1000 BCE, some two millennia beforehand. The Bronze Age saw intensive farming on a scale that we are only just beginning to appreciate. As Oliver Rackham puts it in The History of the Countryside:
"It can no longer be maintained, as used to be supposed even 20 years ago, that Roman Britain was a frontier province, with boundless wild woods surrounding occasional precarious clearings on the best land. On the contrary, even in supposedly backward counties such as Essex, villa abutted on villa for mile after mile, and most of the gaps were filled by small towns and the lands of British farmsteads."Obviously there as loads more forest than now, but 1000 years ago it was about 15% forest, and now it's about 9%
This once popular belief or legend or myth connected to the forest myths of germany and Robin Hood and the idea of a primeval ancient woodland in the British deep dark past. Maybe also connected to a kind of romanticism of a past wild non-modern country.
There are dense forests in that region, including some that are primeval.
I had the good fortune to grow up next to a national park, and can speak un-ironically about tree-hugging.
Battle of Hürtgen Forest
I nearly choked on my lunch when I read that! haha
Even in the US, where land clearing has only been in practice for a few centuries, we’ve seen drastic changes to our landscape. I’d love to see how things looked before American chestnut trees went “extinct” and how people used them in the past. Apparently it was quite the resource.
What? The natives practiced slash-and-burn.
When I was growing up in Scotland, I'm reasonably sure I was told that 95% of Scotland was once covered by the Caledonian Forest. Certainly that's what I've been telling people since then:-) But according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caledonian_Forest it was estimated to have covered 15,000km2, whereas Scotland is 78,000km2, suggesting it was less than 20%.
While it's true that if you leave a patch of land to its own devices currently, it gradually becomes scrub, then dense woodland, it turns out if there are deer and other large herbivores about they do quite a good job at reducing tree cover and turning the landscape into a variety of other ecosystems.
I’m not convinced the wind has changed so much ;)
BlueSky provide a National Tree Map[0] - "a unique, comprehensive database of location, height and canopy/crown extents for every single tree 3m and above in height.". From their data I learned that more than 40% of the borough where I live is tree cover.[1] It's hard to describe how much I enjoy walking the miles and miles of public footpaths through woodland there are on my doorstep.
[0] https://www.bluesky-world.com/ntm
[1] https://www.greatbritishlife.co.uk/homes-and-gardens/places-...
These sort of fan pages were such a part of the old web. It's great to find little pockets of it.
Agreed that it's great to know that special interest sites like this still exist.
"In Ireland, the term "British Isles" is controversial, and there are objections to its usage. The Government of Ireland does not officially recognize the term, and its embassy in London discourages its use. Britain and Ireland is used as an alternative description" [1]
Ireland has not been a British Isle in more than a hundred years when 84% of the island re-gained its independence.
Edit: Actually "Anglo-Celtic Isles" works i suppose
Personally I think that the UK should be separated back into England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Berwick-upon-Tweed. They can then individually decide whether to beg to be allowed back into the EU. The Windsor née Saxe-Coburg-Gotha clan should become private citizens like anyone else (if any country will have them)
On a more serious note, I feel that a lot of problems would be resolved by dividing much of Europe into smaller polities
"Claudius Ptolemy referred to the larger island as great Britain (μεγάλη Βρεττανία megale Brettania) and to Ireland as little Britain (μικρὰ Βρεττανία mikra Brettania) in his work Almagest (147–148 AD)"
I feel that the reference to English and UK colonial and imperial legacy is more a recognition that the term has in the present day become controversial, and, to some, offensive for a number of reasons which include: a history of oppression and/dominance, both within the archipelago and beyond; a jingoistic element within the UK population that considers that to be a good thing; the conflation of the various meanings of _great_
Those things are distinct from where the name came from ≈2,000 years ago, but speak directly to why it might be offensive today
In the US, where I live now, we have "North America" to refer to Canada, USA, Mexico. Makes me wonder if Canadians are offended by that..
It's synonymous with "England" and "the United Kingdom".
What a great project.
When i was at primary school one of the class days out was to Chatelherault park - the picture on the site is still accurate - i have no idea why but the redwoods have always been the defining thing about the park for me ever since we were told about them then.
I’ve always thought we were told they were canadian redwoods but i could easily be wrong. Maybe they said giant redwoods like this site.
Perhaps that's what you're thinking of?
The terms I know as a resident of California are "redwood" and "sequoia" (alternatively, "giant sequoia"). Nothing would be referred to as a "giant redwood".