Cool pic accompanying a story in the NYT about an effort to clone these trees.
If you've never seen giant redwoods in person, don't pass up a chance, should one present in your future. Camping out among them for at least one overnight is highly recommended.
3 comments:
I'll do that in the future.
This article makes it sound like redwoods are hard to find. I never though they were. About 50 years ago some businessmen in Santa Barbara Calif. Decided they wanted a park with big trees in it. So they planted a grove of them in what is today the middle of residential housing, but in those days was the edge of town. They've grown a couple of hundred feet high by now, but you can't camp there as it's only for day use with picnic tables and things such as that.
You probably also know that redwood bark is fireproof and does not burn. The resin-filled center of the tree, however does burn and that's why you see hollow trees with the centers gone. Redwood is also naturally bug resistant and at one time was very cheap so was popular for home building. Redwood trees also drop sap and leaves that poison the ground around them so that not much will grow under them. A friend of mine has one in her backyard that is a couple hundred feet high and ten feet in diameter. They put out a kind of peppery smell which I find quite nice, but some people don't like.
The hills south of San Francisco were once covered with them. The forests were clear cut because it was easy to cut them down and then drag them with teams of horses to the bay water where they were loaded onto barges and taken away to be milled. Redwood City today has one and only one redwood left which they decided to leave there as a monument to the forest that was removed.
Removing the forest changed the climate so that today Redwood City and the rest of the peninsula is a grass covered hot spot that bakes in hundred degree weather in the summer. Muir Woods just 10 miles north of San Francisco is also a redwood forest. I can't imagine there is any problem finding redwood trees. Maybe they can't get permission to take redwood sprouts because they're in a public park or something. But finding them is a piece of cake.
Another place to find a redwood forest in addition to Santa Barbara and Muir Woods. You can camp here overnight.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_P._Taylor_State_Park
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