Giant Sequoia Bark

Here's a close-up I snapped at Tyler Arboretum in Media, PA. This is their signature tree, the same one that my wife was standing under in the photo in this post. I kept this one at full resolution - it makes for a great desktop wallpaper.

The bark of a Giant Sequoia is like that of few others. It's light, fibrous, and can be up to two feet thick at the base. These qualities make it a poor conductor of heat. That, and its fire resistance help protect the sapwood from damage when surrounded by fire. These fires are actually good for a large Sequoia -- they help dry up and open the cones that may stay green and hang in the tree for up to twenty years. This is perfect timing - the newly released seeds will have a new forest floor to take root in.

Okay, So I'm a big Science Geek

So like all other science geeks, I anxiously awaited Discovery Channel's Planet Earth program in HDTV. In the episode Forests: Towering Trees, Falling Leaves, they showed scientists ascending on rope up the biggest trees in the world on the Pacific Coast. The tallest are the Coast Redwood, the biggest are the Giant Sequoia.

I had a thought that it'd be fun... and, really funny... to plant a Giant Sequoia in my back yard. The thought of a 3 million pound, 30-foot diameter, 300-foot tall tree behind a town home still cracks me up! Of course it'll never get that big, but let me have my fun :)

So I did some reading to see if it was even possible to grow one here in southeastern Pennsylvania. Well, I was surprised to find that one of the East Coast's tallest Giant Sequoias wasn't too far from here, in the Tyler Arboretum. So that weekend, my wife and I went out there, and I took this photo of her standing next to it. Further reading confirmed that luckily, I'm in a Goldilocks zone where it's not too cold in the winters, and not too warm in the summer.

So, that was a couple weeks ago. Since then, I ordered over 100 seeds and 13 seedlings. The original idea was to grow these from seeds; the one and two-year-old seedlings were ordered as an afterthought, just in case the seeds thing didn't work out as well as I had hoped.

I'm a week into this project with my first seed germinating a couple days ago, and my seedlings shipping tomorrow. I'm thought I'd share my fun with anyone else out there that thinks this would be a fun project. I bet most people are like I was a couple weeks ago - not knowing that it's actually possible to grow a Giant Sequoia in your back yard!