Giant sequoias are a rapidly growing feature of the UK landscape
phys.org
phys.org
I love Giant Sequoias and have fantasised many times about purchasing a sapling to guerilla plant in my local woods. I've never quite found the perfect spot to do it though.
Giant Sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) and Coast Redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) are two different trees!
Note: It seems that my California nomenclature uses "Redwood" to refer specifically to Coast Redwoods, whereas other regions use "Redwood" to refer to all 3 species of Sequoioideae (Coast Redwood, Giant Sequoia, and Dawn Redwoods"). Also, funnily enough, Coast Redwoods are of the genius "Sequoia", whereas Giant Sequoia are of the genus "Sequoiadendron"
I've long been aware of a thriving population of S. Sempervirens (Coast Redwoods)[1] and a non-zero population of S. Giganteum, but such a thriving population of S. Giganteum is new to me.
The article focuses specifically on S. giganteum, but the references to "redwoods" throw me off.... I'm sure it's accurate, but I'm going to have to read the source paper.
For those in Southern California, there's a grove of Giant Sequoia's on Mount San Jacinto that were planted in the 70's by the Forest Service. [2]
[1] https://www.redwoodworld.co.uk/locations.htm
[2] https://gizmodo.com/these-sequoia-trees-are-thriving-175-mil...
on the genus Sequoia
I would plant one, but their trunks get huge quickly, and I see a lot of busted sidewalks around here due to that.
Redwoods look nicer, in my opinion, but have a bad habit of sprouting like crazy at the base.
Even black walnut is more of a "fuck this sidewalk, and fuck you too" kind of tree.
Current owner of a fucked sidewalk, former owner of a WRC planted way too close to a house.
So that doesn't really clear up the issue. I think it is safe to say that there are some sodding large trees in the UK that originated from the US. Many of them will grow really, really tall. Given that there are "only" 80K S. "Big buggers" in the US and around 0.5M assorted "Redwoods" in the UK, there is a good chance that there are more S. "Rather large" here than there. Ours are the result of deliberate collection and planting. We also have a large number of Monkey puzzle trees too which I think originate from S. Americas.
Just up the road from here: http://www.redwoodworld.co.uk/picturepages/yeovil.htm
Coast Redwood needles look more like a fir tree - flat and extending from a central spine. Coast Redwood cones are about the size of a small marble, about the diameter of a fingernail.
Giant Sequoia needles look more like cypress or juniper - strings/ropes of needles. Giant Sequoia cones are about the size a large chicken egg yolk.
Dawn Redwoods are native to China, previously thought extinct and only recently (1940s?) discovered to be living. Their leaves look more similar to Coast Redwood. I have no idea how common they are in cultivation/landscaping.
Forgive the hotlink...to an image [0]. Image Source [1]
[0] https://landscapeplants.oregonstate.edu/sites/plantid7/files...
[1] https://landscapeplants.oregonstate.edu/plants/sequoia-sempe...
In central Europe there is, e.g., a debate about the role and future of the Douglas fir, which was also introduced from North America centuries ago:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2022.84458...
An example I could find:
> An estimated 500,000 trees are in the UK compared to 80,000 in California.
> To assess how these towering giants are adapting to their UK home, scientists selected a sample of nearly 5,000 trees to study at Wakehurst, Benmore Botanic Garden in Argyllshire, Scotland and Havering Country Park in Essex.
> However, while the trees are doing well in the UK, there's little chance of them taking over our native forests any time soon - they're not reproducing here as they need very specific conditions to take seed.
I'm curious about the final statement - the article goes to great lengths to emphasize the similarity in conditions, so I wonder what would be missing that would prevent sequoias from reproducing. And to quote a phrase 'life, uh, finds a way'.
I wouldn't worry about rogue trees, pretty much all UK forest is to some extent "curated", even the historic old growth places. And they're not exactly hard to see.
They need fire and sun. (And maybe also cold winters). Britain does not have that.
Again the myth of Prometheus, "they need fire, burn, burn, burn"... Yawn.
may die --On California-- UK is a little more humid.
Sequoiadendron grows happy in most temperate areas, including most of Spain. Segovia has some of the tallest trees out of USA, and is a hot place on summer. We have also a few small Sequioadendron forests on the North of Spain since 1950 or even in Granada since 1870. Some Sequioa sempervirens live even in Jaen
(and they don't need fire at all, because gardeners do all the work of taking care for the saplings).
We can plant any tree that we need, were we need it. And we, for sure, will need a lot in the near future.
After all, we put any road that we need where we need it. It was not an obstacle for the last 200 years, so all is needed is the political will to do the same with forests.
The sooner 8 trillion people start planting 3 trillion trees, the better. My quote is filled. Your turn.
The places these trees grow naturally are not naturally fire prone. Go look at any lightning strike map.
"Although the seeds can germinate in moist needle humus in the spring, these seedlings will die as the duff dries in the summer. They therefore require periodic wildfire to clear competing vegetation and soil humus before successful regeneration can occur. Without fire, shade-loving species will crowd out young sequoia seedlings, and sequoia seeds will not germinate". [1]
"There are an estimated half a million redwoods in the UK... fewer than 80,000 giant sequoias remaining in their native California range."
generic redwoods in UK 500,000, specific giant sequoias in Calif 80,000. It does not say how many specific giant sequoias there are in the UK.
https://forestrycommission.blog.gov.uk/2023/06/16/england-tr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah_(pine_tree)
Human lifespans are a flash in the pan compared to some organisms.
Sadly one of those flashes in the pan cut down the tree that was older than Methuselah (at the time, Methuselah is now older).
A big one is that the North American Pacific coast was just one the last places to get significant settlement, so we didn't cut down all the big trees like we did elsewhere. Appalachia, for instance, used to have its share of giant trees. But those trees are still dwarfed by the sequoias.
The West Coast's wet-dry spells lead to more forest fires, presenting another evolutionary pressure on tree height. Tall trees put their canopies far enough away from the flames that fires can sweep through the undergrowth without ever reaching them.
There's also the fact that we have one of the most mild climates in the world: wild temperature fluctuations cause difficulties in getting water up tall trunks.
Finally, there's the fog that keeps the canopies moist.
We've got two recent studies from around here (Santa Cruz mountains) showing that some of our coast redwoods get as much as 30% of their total water from fog. Perhaps relevant to these baby forests in the UK, I suspect that permanently depriving a younger coast redwood of the consistent fog would primarily compromise its photosynthesizing power limiting food production and stunting its growth.
One other thing I've been thinking about but have no data for is a 30% reduction in water would likely also compromise the secondary metabolism that produces tannin and certain resins that can act as a sort of adhesive among fibrous cells and serve to reinforce the tree's wood from fracturing under wind stress or hits from falling neighbors. One of the redwood's keys to longevity is the wood's structure and makeup, both of which are influenced by those that secondary metabolism.
Depriving an established tree of 30% of its total water consumption would likely lead to immediate crown thinning and might cause enough hydraulic system failure to result in something like apical tip die-back. That would not only lead to a serious loss in growth capability for all but those already near the height limits because they can pack on more total mass adding height and girth than girth alone.
Loss of the terminal bud would also open the tip to rot which could eventually hollow out much of the tree. This is not uncommon among mature coast redwoods and the numbers of these hollow giants we find belie the true frequency as the hollowing weakens some of them enough so that wind or fire can more easily take them out. (Note: if you're not familiar with trees, don't worry. they are not made unhappy by the the hollowing. they live on their outsides and the insides are long dead.)
We're seeing the die back here on the east side of the range where the trees redwoods that survived along valleys and creeks down into the foothills and even some into the flats have all lost the top 10% or so most likely from the droughts of the last 50 years. The upper parts of the eastern side and most of the west get the coastal fog to water them and the ones down lower on the east side do not in times of drought and we've had 20 of the last 50 years in moderate or severe drought.
I will try to remind this phrase, specially the per year part.
("just plant trees" is not a viable solution to climate change unless you can plant a very large number of trees which live to maturity)
and what, then? When plants die, their matter is decomposed by fungi and all their carbon is released back into the atmosphere (unless the dead plant matter is buried).
The act of planting trees, in itself, is carbon neutral. Not good, not bad, just irrelevant to the presence of carbon: the carbon is still in the cycle of life within the biosphere.
To reverse the burning of fossil fuels, all that new carbon that we introduced into the biosphere needs to be buried back to where it came from. For example, by cutting trees and burying their wood in sealed mines several kilometers underground.
It's at least a method of buying time, but maybe not so reliable. It presumes no one will find a way to cut them down for profit later. So maybe we'd need to add each tree planted to a growing count of trees "never to be cut" in the country.
Isn't this a little like saying that humans in a confined space don't actually use up any of the oxygen, because it's still technically present in the CO2 they exhale?
> For example, by cutting trees and burying their wood in sealed mines several kilometers underground.
What would be the net benefit of treating it like radioactive waste versus using it as a construction material? Yes, a small percentage of the carbon would escape, but most of it would stay locked up in the wood, and one wouldn't create the massive amounts of CO2 necessary to build and operate those hypothetical mines.
Not the same as Sequoia wood, which is famously wonderful for construction!
Man, that was just a silly example to illustrate the absurdity of the situation. We are currently unearthing millions of years worth of sequestered carbon per year and dumping it all into the atmosphere. Talking about planting trees is ridiculous at this point. Like pumping water out of the sinking titanic with a champagne glass. If we don't want to increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere we just need to stop putting it in!
I wonder how feasible it would be to put wood (from particularly dense species ?) on the bottom of the expanding anoxic ocean zones ? That seems to be one of the rare locations where the only thing that could possibly degrade it are sulphur-"breathing" bacteria, which seem to have trouble digesting lignin ?
But even here, it might still be easier to just stop burning fossil fuels ? EDIT : ninjaed
P.S.: For an opposite example, see how concrete reabsorbs over decades back up to half of the CO2 exhaled during its production.
P.P.S.: Supposedly, soil-buried charcoal is also decently stable, I guess even fungi find it unpalatable ??
Why does every measure have to solve the problem? Buying time is just as important. We start mammoth groves now. Buy time for measures that solve the problem and win huge ressources (building wood, recreational space, erosion prevention) for the future.
It's planting the entirety of the UK, every year, indefinitely. It's employing a few million people with heavy machinery to walk from one side of the planet to the other and bulldoze every farmhouse they find, leaving behind mixed saplings at a wide spacing in the fields.
It's just way easier to decarbonize most of our society than it is to spend the land on forest carbon fixation. It's a lot of land, more land than we'd ever agree to dedicate.
And I would point out that planting trees and then sequestering that carbon periodically with charcoal production is by far the easiest way. Every other technique is ten or a hundred or a thousand times lower payoff.
If you want to slow things down, you have to mostly stop burning fossil fuels. We need to tax the hell out of them, we need to shut down new projects, we need to electrify anything feasible, we need to heavily subsidize and aggressively plan for rapidly scaling renewables. When we're at a 90% reduction in fossil fuel usage, then we can re-assess priorities because we've both "bought some time" and eliminated all the low-hanging fruit that's easier than deliberate carbon fixation projects.
More likely, we'll keep on steamrolling ahead, and something like sulfur geoengineering will be put forward as a way to stave off the worst effects for a while.
Redwoods can give us a few thousand years to sort that out before they decompose.
And this is technologically a big problem because...? Dig a hole and put a seed and pay somebody to watch it for several years is too difficult when our societies are at stake?
Because some people can't avoid to satisfy their chomp-burn-boycott-my-own-future rash?... No problem. This people needs mental help, and society can provide it. Keep them far away from nature.
Ecological systems don't show linear responses. Tiny increases or decreases in a variable can trigger huge changes. Even a partial improvement counts. In the worst case could give us a lot of extra time to have a second chance to try.
Planting trees will not mean that we will survive, just that our chances to survive will increase. It still seems a valuable goal.
OP says 85 kg/year of Carbon per really big tree.
The first calculator I tried said a one way trip from NYC to London on a 787 is over 1000 kg of CO2: https://co2.myclimate.org/en/portfolios?calculation_id=67960...
Now, C is about 25% of the weight of CO2, so this would be 250 kg of Carbon. Is the calculator overestimating? Is my math wrong? Am I interpreting you wrong? Or are you low by a factor of 3?
Maybe. My own calculus gives a first approximate value of 50Kg of Carbon for the same trip NY-London (approx 5570Km) in optimum conditions. The calculators forget also that sometimes tail winds can help, so is just an unsophisticated raw average.
In any case nothing prevent us to design hybrid planes to reduce the fuel consume. A turbine is just a motor so can be built in several different ways. And we could try also both things, hybrid planes and helping forests at the same time.
I also have some Coastal Redwood and Dawn Redwood seeds but none of those germinated. I think I kept them in storage for too long. I might give them another shot.
"A mature redwood adds, on average, a ton of wood to its mass every year."
https://www.noemamag.com/the-extraordinary-lives-of-coast-re...
Are the UK's giant sequoias predominately naturally-grown or human-planted? If the trees successfully adapt their reproduction cycle to the UK, then I imagine that they could become a new invasive (albeit easy-to-cull) species.
https://www.monumentaltrees.com/en/heightrecords/gbr/
I don't recall being in Betws when it wasn't raining, if that helps explain it.
Over the 15 years we've been here about 50 large trees (200' plus) have come down within hearing distance and probably 10 within scare us distance. (these trees weigh as much as a locomotive and would do to your home and you inside what you might imagine a locomotive falling from a couple hundred feet might when do. And at 200+ feet tall, hard to get distance from them, we certainly don't with multiple 200+ beasts within a baseball's throw. My sampling is that 80% of the trees that have come down in the forest around us are Doug firs. They've got a more substantial tap root but they lack the interlocking wide spread of shallow roots that let the redwoods support each other in the high winds that take out trees on our mountain sides when the ground goes from too dry to too wet and vice versa. Also, when a Doug fir comes down, perhaps 20% of the time it's a break where redwoods are all uprooted. Doug firs snap when redwoods can lean and bend.
I wonder if this is one of the mechanisms by which redwoods attain apex status like the many unspoiled groves around here where Doug firs are rare. Our tiny piece of the redwood forest is all new growth since the mow that started in the 1840s and exploded in the 1860s mostly calming by the 1920s and a trickle by the 1990s.
That makes most of the trees in the 100,000 or so acres of surrounding redwoods 100 to 200 years old. They reside in half a dozen 5,000 to 20,000 acre forests in public and private preserves and a few thousand acres in private use, including logging. Each of the preserved forest sections contain multiple groves left uncut in the era of the timber barons and these groves, two good ones within a mile of me include many of the tallest trees in the world.
In my hikes I've realized that the big ones are almost all pretty "hard to get" and that's probably why they survived. Logging in the 1800s was animal and steam powered and moving these chonky trees, even cut into 50 and even 100 ton sections was a big challenge for the horse/mule/oxen (probably 75%) and steamdogs (maybe~25%) that hauled them uphill (downhill included water and water+steam in the mix). The mills were all close by on streams, one famous mill and terminus of a significant 19th century cross mountain road, the eastern leg which still bears his name and is a major artery on the peninsula is about 1,000 feet from the edge of our property. They cut those giants all down to shingles in mills on this side of the mountain in two waves and dragged them up and over to the bay to redwood city and palo alto where the shingles were barged up to build and glorify San Francisco. Take note if you're ever driving around and admiring the turn of the century architecture in the Bay Area, all those shingles are redwood. To me much of looks like the display of so many elephant tusks or other trophies of human extermination efforts. In San Francisco lies this once great forest of the last remnants of of Jurassic trees. (I believe Monkey puzzle trees are less restricted and older and ginkgos are even older and even more widespread. Those trees are our OGs and we should care for them.)
Our plot is small, just a few acres, but it's surrounded by tens of thousands of acres of state and local parks on all sides. We've got about 100 coast redwoods and a dozen large Douglas firs along with the other local trees that gird the two year round streams that border our property on three sides. My big tree is 255 feet tall at last measure and precisely 7 foot DBH. That one lives on the creek and his girth is the evidence. Most of my trees are 3-4 foot diameter with maybe 20 in the 4 and 5 foot ranges. The second cut here was in the 19-teens. The first was 1868 and in the teens they made a second harvest and attempts at a few subdivisions for summer getaways and fishing camps (my creek was the best trout fishing in the state before the clear cutting decimated the streams) so my half a dozen chunky ones should be about 150 years old. Certain characteristics of two of them including the largest one, make me think they were there, perhaps not large enough to cut in that first round and spared by local resident harvesters in the second round so they might have a hundred or even two hundred more years on them than the other several in the same size range but with less "patina".
Possibly the trees can be harvested more delicately today, though.
Redwoods are a fabulous building material. If you’re in the Bay Area, go check your houses joists. Quite a number of old houses here are made of redwood. AFAIK it makes a great wood for joists and structures because it it’s resistant to pests. My nearly 100 year old house’s joists are in fantastic condition. Big, beautiful beams, nearly completely clear and free from knots.
The reason it’s rarely used today is because we’ve cut down all the good trees and it’s wildly uneconomical to grow compared to cheaper woods.
After some brief research, it seems that most any wood can be used, so it's possible there were redwood bows made sometime. The preferred wood is pernambuco. (From the Brazilian paubrasilia echinata tree, now an endangered species so difficult to get new sticks from.) Other popular types are snakewood, sandalwood (cheap), and brazilwood (cheaper). But lately the trend is to use carbon fiber which has become less expensive than wooden bows of the same quality.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39691875
Giant Redwood is not good for construction apparently
Coast Redwood on the other hand is very good.
I wanted to point out to anyone interested that European Redwood is unrelated totally. It is available in building supplies as a joinery timber, but is not a kind of tree. Redwood is from pine. Whitewood (construction timber) is from spruce .
Please do not spread the matchsticks myth. It's insulting the trees and to to San Francisco and other impressive mausoleums of these once noble organisms.
Never had a problem with it and redwood keeps most of the pests and bugs out. I think that's due to all the tannin in the wood.
looks like the fastest growing tree(s) are bamboo:
The world record for the fastest growing plant belongs to certain species of the 45 genera of bamboo, which have been found to grow at up to 91 cm (35 in) per day or at a rate of 0.00003 km/h (0.00002 mph).
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/fastest-g...
(unfortunately two I bought dried out and died on my watch, so will not buy another)
That's funny! I once received a gift: Grow Your Own Giant Sequoia
It was a little pot with soil, and a (allegedly) sequoia seed
Just plant it and wait 200 years 8-)
[0] - https://www.nature.scot/professional-advice/land-and-sea-man...