LET’S KNOW SOME TREES 13 
uppermost pair united; and they bear four little seeds apiece, two 
on each side of the flat central partition. The timber is very durable 
when it can be found free of dry rot, which is its greatest disease 
enemy. 
The western red cedar is found in the foggy Northwest coast 
valleys. Its foliage is very much like that of the true cypresses, and 
its wood is resistant to decay, making it valuable for posts. 
THE SEQUOIAS 
The Sequoias, among the rarest and most noted of all trees, the 
survivors of a former geologic age, were once widely distributed over 
the world, but now are represented by only two species, the bigtree 
and the redwood. 
The bigtree or sequoia of the Sierra Nevada (fig. 11), known as 
“the oldest living thing,” sometimes attains the age of over 3,000 
years. The tallest bigtrees are 250 to 300 feet high and their di- 
ameters at the base vary from 20 to 35 feet. The soft red-brown or 
tan-colored bark is often 2 feet thick. The foliage is blue green in 
color and the leaves are small and-awl-shaped and overlap each other 
covering the slender drooping sprays. The beautiful cones, which 
are matured the second year, are only about 2 inches long and absurdly 
small for those great columnar trunks to bring forth: the tiny 
seeds are thin and flat. The bigtree is found growing in the Sierra 
at elevations varying from 3, 000 to 8,000 feet in 62 separated groves 
scattered along a belt 250 miles long extending from the Forest Hill 
Divide in Placer County to Deer Creek in Tulare County. Several 
books have been written about the bigtrees. Among these are Big 
Trees, by Walter Fry and John R. White, and the Giant Sequoia, 
by Rodney Elsworth. 
The redwoed (fig. 12) sometimes grows to a height even greater 
than the bigtree but is not so large in diameter, nor does it attain 
so great anage. The tallest specimen now known, 364 feet in height, 
is in the Bull Creek grove of the Humboidt State Redwood Park. 
Ring counts on the largest trees indicate an age of over 1,400 years. 
The cones of the redwood, maturing within the- year, are even smaller 
than those of the bigtree, being only about an inch long, and the 
seed is similar. The color of the folage is olive green, with fiat, 
sharp- pointed leaves, from one-third to 1 inch in length, on slender 
branches. 
The redwood is found in an almost uninterrupted belt 450 miles 
long on the seaward side of the Coast Range from southern Oregon 
to the Santa Lucia Mountains in Monterey County, Calif. It never 
grows naturally out of reach of the ocean fogs, and the greatest 
distance it extends inland is 30 miles. 
OTHER CALIFORNIA CONE BEARERS 
‘\ 
A small and useful tree of the high ranges, the western or Sierra 
juniper, is exceedingly long-lived and yields fragrant, cedarlike 
wood. Its small, blue-black berries are technically “cones”; the 
brown-red bark is soft and fibrous. The junipers are usually small 
bushy trees growing in high places and desert borders. Four differ- 
ent species occur in C alifornia. 
