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Updated: May 12, 2025
Before leaving the United States of America a few notes about that country. Sempervirens is so called because young trees develop from the roots of a destroyed parent. If the reader has never seen these enormous trees he cannot well appreciate their immense altitude and dimensions.
Across the bay to the north lies Mount Tamalpais, about 3,000 feet high, and so close that ferries from the waterfront take one in less than half an hour to the little towns of Sausalito and Belvidere, at its foot. Tamalpais is a wooded mountain, with ample slopes, and from it on the north stretch away ridges of forest land, the outposts of the great Northern woods of Sequoia sempervirens.
In the coast mountains it is a fine, tall, rather slender tree, about from sixty to seventy-five feet high, growing with the grand Sequoia sempervirens, or Redwood. But unfortunately it is too good to live, and is now being rapidly destroyed for tan-bark.
The same Sequoia which abounds in the same miocene formations in Northern Europe has been abundantly found in those of Iceland, Spitzbergen, Greenland, Mackenzie River, and Alaska. It is named S. Langsdorfii, but is pronounced to be very much like S. sempervirens, our living redwood of the Californian coast, and to be the ancient representative of it.
It was distributed in past times through Canada, Alaska, Greenland, British Columbia, across Siberia, and down into southern Europe. The Ice Age, and perhaps competition with other trees more successful in seeding down, are responsible for the fact that there are now only two living species the "red wood," or Sequoia sempervirens, and the giant, or Sequoia gigantea.
Among the fossils brought from that island, latitude 70 degrees north, Professor Heer has recognised Sequoia Langsdorfii, a coniferous species which flourished throughout a great part of Europe in the Miocene period, and is very closely allied to the living Sequoia sempervirens of California.
The coast timber is known botanically as sequoia sempervirens, that in the interior as sequoia gigantea.
The Sequoia sempervirens, which is commonly called redwood, is distributed along the Coast Range, the trees thriving only when they are constantly swept by the sea fogs. For lumber this tree is nearly as valuable as the sugar pine. From Eureka to San Diego, this is the material of which most of the houses are built.
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