Sequoia 705 
One of the best accounts of the Wellingtonias and their surroundings is in Muir’s 
Mountains of California. He states that the young trees have slender branches 
growing with great regularity down to the ground, as we see them on an English 
lawn ; but when the tree attains 500 or 600 years old, the spiry, feathery, juvenile 
habit merges into the firm rounded dome-like habit of middle age, which in its turn 
takes on the eccentric picturesqueness of old age. The foliage of the saplings is 
dark bluish-green, while that of the older trees ripens to a warm brownish-yellow 
tint like that of Libocedrus. The bark is rich cinnamon brown, purplish in 
young trees and in shaded portions of the old ones. In winter the trees break out 
into bloom, myriads of small four-sided staminate flowers crowding the ends of the 
smaller sprays, colouring the whole tree, and when ripe dusting the air and the 
ground with golden pollen. The fertile cones are bright grass green, about 2 inches 
long by 14 inch wide, and are composed of about forty firm scales densely packed, 
with three to eight seeds at the base of each, a single cone thus containing 200 to 
300 seeds, which are about 4 inch long by 43; inch wide, with a thin flat margin. The 
cones are very freely produced; and on two branches, 1} to 2 feet in diameter, 
Mr. Muir counted no less than 480. But of the millions of seeds produced, very 
few germinate ; and of these not one in ten thousand lives through the vicissitudes 
of storm, drought, fire, and crushing by snow, to which they are exposed in youth. 
Natural reproduction in the groves, when they have been protected from fire 
and grazing, is said to be at a standstill, owing to the dry humus beneath the trees 
forming an unsuitable seed bed; and it is only in the forests on the south fork of 
the Kaweah, and on the Tule river, where young trees of all ages can be found in 
abundance. 
The damage, waste, and loss which has occurred in those groves which have 
been partially cut for timber is said to be enormous. When a large tree is felled 
its immense weight breaks a great part of the top into useless fragments, and 
crushes many other trees in its fall; whilst the usual means adopted to break up 
the logs into pieces which can be handled is by blasting ; and this destroys another 
large part of the timber. When the best is removed, a mass of broken branches, 
timber, and bark, often 5 or 6 feet in depth, is left on the ground, which is later 
destroyed by fire; leaving complete devastation in place of the most beautiful 
forest; and it is said that owing to various causes, the lumbering of these forests 
has often been quite unprofitable to their owners. 
Mayr? estimates the age of the largest tree which he measured, 33 feet in 
diameter at 13 feet above the ground, to be 4250 years. Sir Joseph Hooker’ told 
Bunbury that, as the Wellingtonia makes repeated growths in the year, it is more 
difficult than is the case in other conifers to distinguish the shoot of one year from 
that of the preceding year; and he suspected that more than one ring of growth is 
formed in each year, and that in consequence the estimates of enormous age of this 
species are probably fallacious. 
1 Waldungen Nordamerika, 343 (1890). 2 Lyell, Life of Sir C. J. F. Bunbury, ii. 227 (1906). 
