CONIFER, 
SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 
145 
SEQUOIA WELLINGTONIA. 
Big Tree. 
ScaLEs of the pistillate flower, usually from 25 to 30, long-pointed. Leaves ovate, 
acute, or lanceolate, slightly spreading or appressed. Buds naked. 
Sequoia Wellingtonia, Seemann, Bonplandia, iii. 27 
(Jan. 1855) ; vi. 343; Ann. and Mag. Nat. Hist. ser. 8, iii. 
165. — Lawson, Pinetum Brit. iii. 299, t. 35, 51, 53, £. 
1-37. 
Sequoia gigantea, Decaisne, Rev. Hort. Jan. 1855, 9, £. 
1 (not Endlicher).— Torrey, Pacific R. R. Rep. iv. pt. 
v. 140.—Carriére, Traité Conif. 166.— Bloomer, Proc. 
Cal. Acad. iii. 399. — Hoopes, Evergreens, 239, f. 29. — 
Parlatore, De Candolle Prodr. xvi. pt. ii. 437. — Koch, 
Dendr. ii. pt. ii. 194.— Engelmann, Brewer & Watson 
Bot. Cal. ii. 117. — Sargent, Forest Trees N. Am. 10th © 
Census U. S. ix. 184.— Lemmon, Rep. California State 
Board Forestry, iii. 165, Frontispiece, t. 19 (Cone-Bearers 
of California); West-American Cone-Bearers, 69, t. 
12. — Koehne, Deutsche Dendr. 44, f.14, H-K. — Masters, 
Jour. R. Hort. Soc. xiv. 247; Gard. Chron. ser. 3, xix. 
556, f. 85. — Hansen, Jour. R. Hort. Soc. xiv. 306 (Pine- 
tum Danicum).— Merriam, North American Fauna, No. 
7, 340 (Death Valley Exped. ii.). — Coville, Contrib. U.S. 
Nat. Herb. iv. 224 (Bot. Death Valley Exped.). 
Wellingtonia gigantea, Lindley, Gard. Chron. 1853, 
823. — Bot. Mag. \xxx. t. 4777, 4778. — Lemaire, J7l. 
Hort. 1854, 14, t. — Naudin, Rev. Hort. 1854, 166; FV. 
des Serres, ix. 93, t. 892, 893. — Planchon, FV. des Serres, 
ix. 121, t. 903. — Floricultural Cabinet, 1854, 121, t.— 
J. M. Bigelow, Pacific Rk. R. Rep. iv. pt. v. 22. — Gordon, 
Pinetum, 330. — A. Murray, Edinburgh New Phil. Jour. 
n. ser. xi. 205, t. 3-9; Trans. Bot. Soc. Edinburgh, vi. 
330, t. 6, £. 8, 9. — Henkel & Hochstetter, Syn. Nudelh. 
222. — Carritre, Traité Conif. ed. 2, 217. — Nordlinger, 
Forstbot. 463, f.— Veitch, Man. Conif. 204. — Lauche, 
Deutsche Dendr. ed. 2, 78, £. 14.—Schiibeler, Virid. 
Norveg. i. 445. 
Taxodium giganteum, Kellogg & Behr, Proc. Cal. Acad. 
i. 51 (May, 1855). 
Gigantabies Wellingtoniana, (Nelson) Senilis, Pinaceae, 
79 (1866). 
The average height of Sequoia Wellingtonia’ is about two hundred and seventy-five feet, and its 
trunk diameter near the ground twenty feet, although individuals from three hundred to three hundred 
and twenty feet tall, with trunks from twenty-five to thirty-five feet thick are not rare? During four 
or five centuries the tapering stem is clothed with slender crowded branches, which are erect above and 
horizontal near the middle of the tree, and below sweep toward the ground in graceful curves, thus 
forming a dense narrow strict pyramid. Gradually the lower branches disappear, and those at the top 
of the tree lose their aspiring habit; the trunk, which is much enlarged and buttressed at the base, and 
fluted with broad low rounded ridges, becomes naked for one hundred or one hundred and fifty 
1 Dr. C. F. Winslow, who visited the Calaveras grove in August, 
1854, proposed in a letter to The California Farmer, a weekly jour- 
nal published in San Francisco, that the Big Tree, if it should be a 
Taxodium, should be called Tazodium Washingtonianum, or if it 
proved to be the representative of an undescribed genus, that, as 
Washingtonia Californica, it should commemorate the name of 
George Washington. (See Hooker, Jour. Bot. and Kew Gard. 
Misc. vii. 29.) Neither of these names, however, was ever pub- 
lished technically, and Lindley’s and Decaisne’s specific name gigan- 
tea being unavailable from previous use in connection with the other 
species of this genus, the first available specific name for the largest 
and one of the most interesting trees of North America is that of 
the English general in whose honor the genus Wellingtonia was 
established on this tree. 
2 In the Calaveras grove there are three trees over three hundred 
feet high, the tallest measuring three hundred and twenty-five feet. 
The largest tree measured by Muir is standing in the King’s River 
forest, and four feet above the ground has a trunk diameter of 
thirty-five feet eight inches inside the bark. Muir’s examination 
of the trunk of this tree, which is burned nearly half through, 
showed that it has lived not less than four thousand years, although 
the layers of annual growth were in places so contorted and in- 
volved that it was impossible to count them all; and he believes 
that other trees now standing are at least five thousand years old. 
The layers of annual growth, counted by Asa Gray on the stump 
of a tree which was cut several years ago in the Calaveras grove in 
order that the top of the stump might serve as a dancing-floor, 
showed that it had attained a diameter of twenty-four feet inside 
the bark in about thirteen hundred years. A tree of nearly the 
same size, which had been cut down, in the King’s River forest, 
examined by Muir, was twenty-three hundred years old. (See 
Muir, The Mountains of California, 179. See, also, Gray, Proc. Am. 
Acad. iii. 94.) 
