Appendix T for Trees

Appendix T for Trees

AJ’s horticultural background would not allow her to go through the world without putting names to and classifying the plants around her. However far from home she went, foreign lands never seemed too strange or frightening if she could name a few plants on the trail or roadside. On the trip to the Sierra Nevadas, this impulse was frustrated more than once. She was in a place where most of the plants were unfamiliar to her: she was just another botanically unaware visitor.

Coastal Redwoods

Her sense of place was disoriented on the hillside stop in Day 2, where she smelled and beheld the silver-leafed yellow-flowered artemisia. Based on the flowers, she could clump it in with the sunflower family, the leaves and scent hinted at the genus Artemisia, but the exact name eluded her. She knew the licorice-smelling bronzish-green tall clumps along the road were fennel, from the Carrot family. The names of the towering, spreading trees with grey-cream mottled trunks and thin, lanceolate leaves eluded her. 

She encountered more mysterious trees and plants in Yosemite, like the tall, straight pine with brown bark outlined with darker brown, whose trunk seemed to shoot straight from the ground with no hint that it had roots holding it up. More than once, she flipped through a botanical guide book in the many gift shops they visited, but though the frustration of not knowing the names and familial places of these plants tortured her horticultural sense, she abstained from buying the books, and resolved to remain ignorant. This would also spare her family the botanical themed lectures and tidbits she was so often known to give. 

 But when one is in the presence of the tallest, largest and oldest organisms in the world, it is hard to pass them by without wanting to know all about them. She wondered what makes them different and where they fit into the plant world, she wanted to understand how these giants could possibly be plants at all.

Giant Sequoias

And she didn’t want these majestic trees to live on in an undifferentiated clump in her mind because, like people, though most of us look and act alike in the general sense, there is so much that makes us different, and a person could spend a lifetime (and they do, in the fields of medicine, psychology, psychiatry, etc) studying those differences and how that information can help humanity. 

In this impulse to study and appreciate the uniqueness of each member of this grand dendrological subfamily, she found the element that makes most families interesting and beautiful: differences. AJ’s gradient theory (end of Day 2) turned her mind to thanksgiving for differences, for the tall and skinny, for the thick and hefty, for puny and ancient. 

With a little digging, here is what she discovered:

The Coastal Redwoods and Sequoia trees are brothers, in the family Cupressaceae (think arborvitae, juniper, and cypress landscape shrubs), subfamily Sequoioideae. There are only three plants in this subfamily. 

One family member is the Coastal Redwood, Sequoia sempervirens, who is the tall, skinny basketball player (Muir Woods National Monument, Day 3). They grow up to 380 feet tall and up to 30 feet in diameter at breast height. 

The Foot of a Sequoia

Next is the Sequoia, Sequoiadendron giganteum, who is the extremely big-boned, line-backer of the family (Sequoia National Park, Day 7). They grow up to 311 feet tall and 56 feet in diameter.

Last, and least in terms of size, is the Dawn Redwood, Metasequoia glyptostroboides, who is the puny, ancient family member they thought had been lost millions of years ago when dinosaurs walked the earth. It was recently (1943) found roaming aimlessly and incoherent in a forest in Asia. These triangular-shaped deciduous fossils are available as landscape trees. They grow up to a modest 115 feet tall and to an inconsequential diameter compared to their brothers. AJ has a specimen of the Dawn Redwood in her backyard, in Michigan. 

Dawn Redwood in Fall

Dawn Redwood in Summer