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 11⁄2 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 1⁄4 inch long by 3⁄16 inch wide, with a thin flat margin. The cones are very freely produced; and on two branches, 11⁄2 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).
