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SEQUOIA
Rules and Regulations 1920 |
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JOHN MUIR'S DESCRIPTION OF THE GIANT SEQUOIA.
From John Muir's "Our National Parks"1 is taken the following description of the celebrated sequoia trees:
1Used by permission of the Houghton Mifflin Co., authorized publishers.
"The big tree (Sequoia gigantea)2 is nature's forest masterpiece, and, so far as I know, the greatest of living things. It belongs to an ancient stock, as its remains in old rocks show, and has a strange air of other days about it, a thoroughbred look inherited from the long ago—the auld lang syne of trees. Once the genus was common, and with many species flourished in the now desolate Arctic regions, in the of North America, and in Europe; but in long, eventful wanderings from climate to climate only two species have survived the hardships they had to encounter, the gigantea and sempervirens, the former now restricted to the western slopes of the Sierra, the other to the Coast Mountains, and both to California, excepting a few groves of redwood which extend into Oregon.
2According to Sudworth, the technical name, which has been in dispute among authors, is, on grounds of priority, Sequoia washingtoniana which he gave it in 1854. It has also been called Sequoia wellingtoniana.
"The Pacific coast in general is the paradise of conifers. Here nearly all of them are giants, and display a beauty and magnificence unknown elsewhere. The climate is mild, the ground never freezes, and moisture and sunshine abound all the year.
"Nevertheless it is not easy to account for the colossal size of the sequoias. The largest are about 300 feet high and 30 feet in diameter. Who of all the dwellers of the plains and prairies and fertile home forests of round-headed oak and maple, hickory, and elm, ever dreamed that earth could bear such growths, trees that the familiar pines and firs seems to know nothing about—lonely, silent, serene, with a physiognomy almost godlike; and so old, thousands of them still living had already counted their years by tens of centuries when Columbus set sail from Spain and were in the vigor of youth or middle age when the star led the Chaldean sages to the infant Saviour's cradle? As far as man is concerned they are the same yesterday, to-day, and forever emblems of permanence.
"No description can give any adequate idea of their singular majesty, much less of their beauty. Excepting the sugar pine, most of their neighbors with pointed tops seem to be forever shouting 'Excelsior,' while the big tree, though soaring above them all, seems satisfied, its rounded head poised lightly as a cloud giving no impression of trying to go higher. Only in youth does it show like other conifers a heavenward yearning, keenly aspiring with a long, quick-growing top. Indeed the whole tree for the first century or two, or until 100 to 150 feet high, is arrowhead in form, and, compared with the solemn rigidity of age, is as sensitive to the wind as a squirrel tail. The lower branches are gradually dropped as it grows older and the upper ones thinned out until comparatively few are left. These, however, are developed to great size, divide again and again, and terminate in bossy rounded masses of leafy branchlets, while the head becomes dome shaped.
"Then poised in fullness of strength and beauty, stern and solemn in mien, it glows with eager, enthusiastic life, quivering to the tip of every leaf and branch and far-reaching root, calm as a granite dome, the first to feel the touch of the rosy beams of the morning, the last to bid the sun good night.
"ITS STATELINESS AND DENSELY MASSED FOLIAGE.
"Perfect specimens, unhurt by running fires or lightning, are singularly regular and symmetrical in general form, though not at all conventional, showing infinite variety in sure unity and harmony of plan. The immensely strong, stately shafts, with rich purplish brown bark, are free of limbs for 150 feet or so, though dense tufts of sprays occur here and there, producing an ornamental effect, while long, parallel furrows give a fluted columnar appearance. It shoots forth its limbs with equal boldness in every direction, showing no weather side. On the old trees the main branches are crooked and rugged and strike rigidly outward mostly at right angles from the trunk, but there is always a certain measured restraint in their reach which keeps them within bounds.
"No other Sierra tree has foliage so densely massed or outline so finely, firmly drawn, and so obediently subordinate to an ideal type. A particularly knotty, angular, ungovernable-looking branch, 5 to 8 feet in diameter and perhaps 1,000 years old, may occasionally be seen pushing out from the trunk as if determined to break across the bounds of the regular curve, but like all the others, as soon as the general outline is approached the huge limb dissolves into massy bosses of branchlets and sprays, as if the tree were growing beneath an invisible bell glass against the sides of which the branches were molded, while many small, varied departures from the ideal form give the impression of freedom to grow as they like.
"Except in picturesque old age, after being struck by lightning and broken by a thousand snowstorms, this regularity of form is one of the big tree's most distinguishing characteristics. Another is the simple sculptural beauty of the trunk and its great thickness as compared with its height and the width of the branches, many of them being from 8 to 10 feet in diameter at a height of 200 feet from the ground, and seeming more like finely modeled and sculptured architectural columns than the stems of trees, while the great strong limbs are like rafters supporting the magnificent dome head.
"THE MAGNITUDE OF ITS ROOT SYSTEM.
"The root system corresponds in magnitude with the other dimensions of the tree, forming a flat far-reaching spongy network 200 feet or more in width without any taproot, and the instep is so grand and fine, so suggestive of endless strength, it is long ere the eye is released to look above it. The natural swell of the roots, though at first sight excessive, gives rise to buttresses no greater than are required for beauty as well as strength, as at once appears when you stand back far enough to see the whole tree in its true proportions. The fineness of the taper of the trunk is shown by its thickness at great heights—a diameter of 10 feet at a height of 200 being, as we have seen, not uncommon. Indeed, the boles of but few trees hold their thickness as well as sequoia.
"Resolute, consummate, determined in form, always beheld with wondering admiration, the big tree always seems unfamiliar, standing alone, unrelated, with peculiar physiognomy, awfully solemn and earnest. Nevertheless, there is nothing alien in its looks. The Madrona, clad in thin, smooth, red and yellow bark and big glossy leaves, seems, in the dark coniferous forests of Washington and Vancouver Island, like some lost wanderer from the magnolia groves of the South, while the sequoia, with all its strangeness, seems more at home than any of its neighbors, holding the best right to the ground as the oldest, strongest inhabitant.
"One soon becomes acquainted with new species of pine and fir and spruce as with friendly people, shaking their outstretched branches like shaking hands, and fondling their beautiful little ones; while the venerable aboriginal sequoia, ancient of ether days, keeps you at a distance, taking no notice of you, speaking only to the winds, thinking only of the sky, looking as strange in aspect and behavior among the neighboring trees as would the mastodon or hairy elephant among the homely bears and deer. Only the Sierra juniper is at all like it, standing rigid and unconquerable on glacial pavements for thousands of years, grim, rusty, silent, uncommunicative, with an air of antiquity about as pronounced as that so characteristic of sequoia.
"The bark of full-grown trees is from 1 to 2 feet thick, rich cinnamon brown, purplish on young trees and shady parts of the old, forming magnicent masses of color with the underbrush and beds of flowers. Toward the end of winter the trees themselves bloom while the snow is still 8 or 10 feet deep. The pistillate flowers are about three-eighths of an inch long, pale green, and grown in countless thousands on the ends of the sprays. The staminate are still more abundant, pale yellow, a fourth of an inch long, and when the golden pollen is ripe they color the whole tree and dust the air and the ground and near.
"The cones are bright, grass-green in color, about 2-1/2 inches long, 1-1/2 wide, and are made up of 30 or 40 strong, closely packed, rhomboidal scales with four to eight seeds at the base of each. The seeds are extremely small and light, being only from an eighth to a fourth of an inch long and wide, including a filmy surrounding wing, which causes them to glint and waver in falling and enables the wind to carry them considerable distances from the tree.
"The faint lisp of snowflakes as they light is one of the smallest sounds mortal can hear. The sound of falling sequoia seeds, even when they happen to strike on flat leaves or flakes of barks, is about as faint. Very different is the bumping and thudding of the falling cones. Most of them are cut off by the Douglas squirrel and stored for the sake of the seeds, small as they are. In the calm Indian summer these busy harvesters with ivory sickles go to work early in the morning, as soon as breakfast is over, and nearly all day the ripe cones fall in a steady pattering, bumping shower. Unless harvested in this way they discharge their seeds and remain on the trees for many years. In fruitful seasons the trees are fairly laden. On two small specimen branches 1-1/2 and 2 inches in diameter I counted 480 cones. No other California conifer produces nearly so many seeds, excepting perhaps its relative, the redwood of the coast mountains. Millions are ripened annually by a single tree, and the product of one of the main groves in a fruitful year would suffice to plant all the mountain ranges of the world.
"NATURE'S GIANT BIRDHOUSES.
"The dense tufted sprays make snug nesting places for birds, and in some of the loftiest, leafiest towers of verdure thousands of generations have been reared, the great solemn trees shedding off flocks of merry singers every year from nests, like the flocks of winged seeds from the cones.
"The big tree keeps its youth far longer than any of its neighbors. Most silver firs are old in their second or third century, pines in their fourth or fifth, while the big tree growing beside them is still in the bloom of its youth, juvenile in every feature at the age of old pines, and can not be said to attain anything like prime size and beauty before its fifteen hundredth year, or under favorable circumstances become old before its three thousandth.
"Many, no doubt, are much older than this. On one of the Kings River giants, 35 feet 8 inches in diameter exclusive of bark, I counted upward of 4,000 annual wood rings, in which there was no trace of decay after all these centuries of mountain weather.
"THE OLDEST LIVING THING.
"There is no absolute limit to the existence of any tree. Their death is due to accidents, not, as of animals, to the wearing out of organs. Only the leaves die of old age, their fall is foretold in their structure; but the leaves are renewed every year and so also are the other essential organs—wood, roots, bark, buds. Most of the Sierra trees die of disease. Thus, the magnificent silver firs are devoured by fungi, and comparatively few of them live to see their three hundredth birth year. But nothing hurts the big tree. I never saw one that was sick or showed the slightest sign of decay. It lives on through indefinite thousands of years until burned, blown down, undermined, or shattered by some tremendous lightning stroke.
"No ordinary bolt ever seriously hurts sequoia. In all my walks I have seen only one that was thus killed outright. Lightning, though rare in the California lowlands, is common on the Sierra. Almost every day in June and July small thunderstorms refresh the main forest belt. Clouds like snowy mountains of marvelous beauty grow rapidly in the calm sky about midday and cast cooling shadows and showers that seldom last more than an hour. Nevertheless these brief, kind storms wound or kill a good many trees. I have seen silver firs 200 feet high split into long peeled rails and slivers down to the roots, leaving not even a stump, the rails radiating like the spokes of a wheel from a hole in the ground where the tree stood. But the sequoia, instead of being split and slivered, usually has 40 or 50 feet of its brash knotty top smashed off in short chunks about the size of cordwood, the beautiful rosy red ruins covering the ground in a circle a hundred feet wide or more. I never saw any that had been cut down to the ground or even to below the branches except one in the Stanislaus Grove, about 12 feet in diameter, the greater part of which was smashed to fragments, leaving only a leafless stump about 75 feet high. It is a curious fact that all the very old sequoias have lost their heads by lightning. 'All things come to him who waits.'
"But of all living things sequoia is perhaps the only one able to wait long enough to make sure of being struck by lightning. Thousands of years it stands ready and waiting, offering its head to every passing cloud as if inviting its fate, praying for heaven's fire as a blessing; and when at last the old head is off, another of the same shape immediately begins to grow on."
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Last Updated: 25-Aug-2010