LAST week on this page Damien Enright described the magnificent trees on the neglected estate at Kincragie, near where he lives in Co Cork.
He mentioned that both species of true sequoia grow there and that one species boasted the world’s tallest tree and the other the world’s largest, in terms of mass.
The giant redwood has at least six different names in English, in addition to its botanical name of Sequoiadendron giganteum, and is often called Wellingtonia in this country. It’s believed that a giant redwood is the largest tree in the world. It’s a specimen called General Sherman, which follows the Americans’ odd habit of naming their biggest trees after soldiers.
All wild giant redwoods grow on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, a mountain range in eastern California. As a tree lover I have twice made a pilgrimage to visit General Sherman, below, and his cohorts and he is truly magnificent. But I am not totally convinced that he is the largest tree in the world.
It’s not that easy to make an accurate measurement of the mass of a living tree but General Sherman is estimated to have 50,000 cubic feet (1,400 cubic metres) of timber above ground.
I have seen huge baobabs in Africa and massive and unidentifiable trees in Central American rainforests that are on this sort of scale. Perhaps one of them is capable of toppling the American general from his pedestal. For instance, a massive Coastal Redwood was discovered in the year 2000 and that some people believe it has more cubic metres of timber in it than General Sherman.
So would that give the Coastal Redwood both the titles? This species grows rather sparsely in the fog-watered strip of forest stretching along the coast of southern Oregon and northern California. I have made this pilgrimage too and seen the twin-trunked specimen that it supposed to be the tallest tree in the world.
His name is Howard Libby and he is 121.4 metres (367 feet 8 inches) tall. The original Howard Libbey was president of the Arcata Redwood Company which originally owned the land the tree grows on. It is now a national park.
The tree’s very precise height has been quoted for decades but the top of the tree is dead so it’s unlikely to have grown even taller. Measuring the height of a tree is a bit easier than measuring its volume. In fact, if the tree is obligingly growing in the middle of an open field it’s a simple piece of secondary school geometry. But Howard Libbey grows in quite thick forest, which is not so easy, and measuring trees in a tangled rainforest is very hard indeed.
But if Howard Libbey is the tallest tree in the world it’s fairly certain that up until quite recently there were taller ones. For example, a Douglas Fir felled in 1902 in Vancouver Island was measured at 415 feet (126 metres) and it seems that this species regularly grew to this size at the time.
But Douglas Fir timber is very valuable and all the big ones were felled. And it takes this species between 500 and 1000 years to reach this height.
There is another interesting record from Australia which is not quite authenticated. It’s claimed that in 1868 an Australian Mountain Ash (Eucalyptus regnans) was felled and measured at 464 feet (141 metres). But as far as living trees go, there is no good evidence with which to challenge the record holders in the United States.
dick.warner@examiner.ie
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, February 11, 2008
