It was named after Sequoya, a Cherokee chief.
It is native to the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California – from Lake Tahoe in the north (near San Francisco) to Yosemite National Park and the Sequoia National Park in the south (near Los Angeles). They grow in very well-defined groves in mixed forests. They are almost all protected, but they have been logged so extensively that they’re still considered a vulnerable species in the wild. There are 68 groves of sequoia trees remaining that total an area of only 144 km2.
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| A young army, training to march. To Woden. |
The tallest sequoia in the world is named ‘General Sherman’. The General is 83.8m tall (that’s the height of a 26-storey building: only a few metres shorter than the Lovett Tower that you can see over in Woden) and has a diameter of 10 m.
The fattest sequoia is named the Waterfall Tree, with a girth of 47 m.
The oldest sequoia known was greater than 3,200 years old.
Their wood is fibrous and brittle, which makes it unsuitable for many uses. They would often shatter when they hit the ground and as little as half of the felled timber would make it to the mill.
These trees were planted in 2008. For all of our lifetimes they will be considered the infants of the sequoias in the world – it takes them a long time to reach middle age. They will look like upside-down ice-cream cones for a few hundred years, but eventually some of them might grow to 90 m tall with a round top and thick trunks for much of their height so that they retain their balance. Their trunk, at ground level, will have a diameter of over 17 metres (that’s the size of two buses end-to-end). We’ll have to come back in 500 or 750 years to see one that tall here, though.
A more mature planting of Sequoiadendron giganteum can be visited in and even picnicked at in Canberra, at the Redwood Grove Park near the Canberra airport (north-east corner of Pialligo Ave and Glenora Drive, Fairbairn).
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| Look for the very, very tall trees |
References
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