coast redwoods in Muir Woods (Sequoia sempervirens) are conifers, one of the three surviving redwood species left on Earth in small pockets in isolated areas. At one time, there were two million acres of virgin coast redwood forests; now a little more than 3 percent of the original forest remains safe from loggers in state parks and one national park. Efforts to save these old growth trees on privately held land has been an ongoing struggle, beginning with John Muir, taken up by Save the Redwoods League, Earth First!, and other organizations and individuals. (“Old growth” forests are where there are no signs of past or present human activity.) The world's tallest tree is a coast redwood. The title is currently held by Stratosphere Giant at 368.6 feet in Humboldt State Park, edging out the longtime titleholder Tall Tree in Redwood National Park, which in 1990 was estimated to be over 1,500 years old and 368 feet (112 meters) tall. Twenty-six redwoods over 360 feet tall have been found, eighty-six over 350 feet. These coast redwoods are the tallest living things on Earth.
Their cousins are the giant redwoods (Sequoiadendron giganteum) found on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. General Sherman, a giant redwood growing in the Sequoia National Park, is the largest living thing on Earth, with an estimated age of 2,700 years, and an estimated weight of 2.7 million pounds (1.2 million kilograms). Their only other living relative is the dawn redwood, which grows in a remote area of the Hubei province in China.
These trees are ancient tree beings and great works of Nature's art. To a tree person, cutting them down for lumber would be like pulverizing Michelangelo's statues of David or the Pieta to make marble tiles, or bulldozing the acropolis in Athens as a site for a hotel.
Trees are the oldest living things on Earth. Among the bristlecone pines growing on a barren mountainside in eastern California's White Mountains, there is a 4,841-year-old (as of 2010) bristlecone (Pinus longaeva) named Methuselah, after the longest-lived patriarch in the biblical book of Genesis (said to have lived 969 years). Methuselah lives in a grove with others that are over four thousand years old. These trees began their lives before the great pyramids of Egypt were built. They grow on steep, rocky slopes at elevations between 9,000 feet and 11,500 feet (2,700–3,500 meters). Half the year, the temperature is below freezing, with deep snowfalls and ferocious winds. The harsh environment and the bristlecones' response to it have enabled them to reach their great age. That they don't have humans in their vicinity is one saving grace, and they are protected and in a national park, which makes their survival much more likely.
The 2009 documentary The National Parks: America's Best Idea by Ken Burns is a twelve-hour series that tells the story of each park as well as shows them to us. Meant to be reserved for the people for all time, national parks came into being through the fierce love that influential and often very wealthy men had for the beauty and splendor of wilderness places. Ancient forests of giant sequoias and towering redwoods as well as the bristlecone pines are now within America's national parks.
Anna Lewington and Edward Parker open their book Ancient Trees: Trees That Live for a Thousand Years with this quote from John Muir: “Among all the varied productions with which Nature has adorned the surface of the earth, none awakens our sympathies, or interests our imagination so powerfully as those venerable trees which seem to have stood the lapse of ages, silent witnesses of the successive generations of man, to whose destiny they bear so touching a resemblance, alike in their budding, their prime and their decay.” The authors initially set out on a journey of discovery hoping to include some twenty-four species of trees that live over a thousand years. Their list rose to a hundred and the list is still growing. They comment that some of the world's oldest and most impressive inhabitants have already begun their fourth, fifth, sixth, or even seventh millennium. They report that a carbon-dated small-leaved lime tree (Tilia cordata) in a woodland in the west of England has already celebrated its six-thousandth birthday, and a common yew (Taxus baccata) in Fortingall, Scotland, could be nine thousand years old.
When I came home to find my huge beautiful Monterey pine tree was now an impressive stump, one question that could now be answered was its/her age: forty-two years old. As just about everyone knows, the age of a tree can be determined once it is cut down, by the number of its concentric growth rings. It is part of American tree lore, because this is so for trees that grow seasonally in temperate zones. In good years, the growth rings are broad; in bad growing years, such as a drought year, the rings are close together.
Tree Anatomy and Physiology
What are tree rings, anyway? The question led me to learn about the nutrient transport system inside of trees. Water travels upward through the trunk from its underground roots. A large root called the taproot grows straight down, other roots grow out laterally and branch out to hold the tree down, while very fine root hairs at the ends of roots take water and dissolved minerals and salts from the soil. If we could see this branching root system, it might resemble the structure and size of tree branches that we can see growing up from the trunk (as above, so below). Inside the roots, the tree changes the water into a liquid called root sap, which moves up the trunk in a layer of wood called the sapwood or xylem, comprising masses of miniscule tubes. Inside the xylem, root sap moves through the branches and out to nourish every leaf. Each green leaf is a little photosynthesis unit, which uses moisture and sunlight to remove carbon from the carbon dioxide in the air from which it makes sugars to feed the tree and oxygen to release into the air.
These sugars are then carried through strings of cells out from the leaves, outward and downward, to nourish the rest of the tree. These cells form a layer on the outside of the xylem, just beneath the bark of the tree, called the phloem. In between the xylem and the phloem, there is a thin layer of stem cell tissue, the cambrium, which runs from the leaves to the roots. All along the trunk there are medullary rays or conduits that link these elements with the outside of the tree, enabling the trunk of the tree to grow in diameter as the tree grows. The job of the cambrium is to create more xylem vessels on the inside and more phloem tissue on the outside. As xylem and phloem layers cease functioning and die, dead xylem becomes the heartwood, new xylem the sapwood, while the dead phloem is incorporated into the bark. Usually, new xylem is laid down in the spring and is wide and thin-walled; in the summer, the xylem is narrower, thick-walled, and dark in comparison with the spring xylem. These differences result in one growth ring per season. Having the cambrium close to the bark, the trunk of a tree can grow thicker year by year, some even for thousands of years.
My premed courses in college, medical school, internship, and residency were years of intense learning. There is an immense amount of information that a doctor of medicine needs to learn, and upon which we were tested, over and over again, with class rankings and the next rung up the professional ladder dependent on how much and how well we learned. Left out was the wonder of how the body was constructed and worked, or how the meeting of an ovum and sperm came with elaborate guidance on how to grow into a baby, or how a baby grows smoothly into an adult human being. There are glimpses of wonder along the way in the training of a doctor, but no one talked about such things. Wonder is all too often left behind in the process of becoming an adult, as well. When it is, an essential spiritual element is missing. We humans come into the world with a sense of wonder, expressed and seen most clearly in childhood. Wonder is a precious sensibility to retain. Wonder and imaginative play go together in childhood and are together in the mind of creative adults who can be fascinated and enthralled by their new discoveries that then stimulate ideas and art. Wonder makes living on this planet an adventure. Then as we become aware of the vulnerability of life, some are called to save lives, others to preserve nature.
To grow like a tree is to be part of an interconnected mutually supportive circle of life: from soil to tree to water vapor to clouds to rain to soil and up again (the big picture) as well as a mini-ecosystem that sustains and nourishes this one tree. Whether as one tree on a hillside or one tree among millions in a boreal rain forest, this is so for every tree that lives naturally.
To spread the ashes
