#sequoiadendron

Plant of the Day

Tuesday 28 January 2025

Usually described as a large and long-lived evergreen specimen for a large park or garden Sequoiadendron giganteum (giant redwood, big tree, giant sequoia, mammoth tree, Sierra redwood, washingtonia, wellingtonia) these trees were planted many decades ago in a garden and churchyard either side of a road in this village in Essex, UK. They were a great feature as a view from a cafe window.

AKA giant redwood, Sierra redwood or Wellingtonia. First described in 1853 by English botanist John Lindley as Wellingtonia gigantea, but that generic had already been used for an unrelated plant in the family Sabiaceae. In 1854 French botanist Joseph Decaisne put it in the same genus as the coast redwood, naming it Sequoia gigantea, but that name had been applied, wrongly, to the coast redwood in 1847. Also in 1854 American botanist Andreas Peter Winslow named it Washingtonia californica - American botanists being slightly pissed that an English botanist had named the tree after a English military hero - but this name too was invalid, since there was already a palm genus Washingtonia. In 1907, German botanist Carl Ernst Otto Kuntze got in on the fun and put it in the otherwise extinct genus Steinhauera, but that's dubious enough to also be invalid.

These nomenclatural oversights (to put it politely) were corrected in 1939 by American gymnosperm expert John Theodore Buchholz, who put it in the new genus Sequoiadendron to stand proudly alone (the other two in the genus extinct since the Miocene and the Cretaceous respectively).

A giant cypress native to the Sierra Nevada, and the most massive trees on Earth. The tallest known is 94.8 m (311 ft) tall, and the widest trunk diameter reached 8.8 m (28.9 ft). Ages are known to have exceeded 3200 years.

Giant sequoias are adapted to forest fires, with unusually resistant bark, and cones that open immediately after a fire. They're having difficulty reproducing in their remaining habitat due to the seeds only being able to grow successfully in full sun and in mineral-rich soils, free from competing vegetation. That said, new stands planted in the San Jacinto Mountains and elsewhere, after forest fires cleared out the competition, are doing quite well.

An endangered species with fewer than 80,000 remaining in its native California. Infuriatingly, logged for timber despite being so brittle it was only good for fence posts and toothpicks.

Once much more widely distributed, and reasonably common in North American and Eurasian conifer forests until the last ice age.

In Aotearoa, ornamental Sequoias have already reached trunk diameters of over 3 meters in 120 years. They have a long way to go.