The tallest and longest-lived trees (their age is 4 thousand years and more) - sequoias grow in North America.
Americans discovered these trees only in the 19th century, and for a long time they did not believe the discoverers. In 1833, a man named Leonard in the Sierra Nevada discovered a grove of 100-meter trees and wrote a book about them. The book did not interest anyone, the readers decided that the author invented everything.
Twenty years have passed, and crowds of gold seekers rushed to these places. Daud - one of the "seekers of happiness" - chased after the wounded grizzly bear and … rested against a solid wooden wall. It was not a fence built by people, but a huge wooden fortress grown by nature. The hunter returned and told about the amazing find. They made fun of him.
Then Daud cheated. He said he killed a bear the size of a large house. At this point, everyone ran into the forest and … saw a redwood grove! People stood in mute amazement before the giants, next to which they seemed smaller than ants. From that time on, all of America believed in the existence of supergiant trees, and everyone rushed in search of sequoias.
In total, 72 groves were found, and each tree in them received its own name: "old bachelor", "three sisters", "miner's hut", and a fallen tree with a hollow, into which a rider could enter, was named "riding school". There is even a sequoia named after the writer Mark Twain.
Enterprising businessmen bought these groves and let tourists there for money. Well, in fact, where else can you see a tunnel cut in the trunk, where a horse-drawn carriage freely passes! This tunnel still exists - a road has been laid along it and cars are moving in a stream.
Promotional video:
Where else on the stump can an orchestra and sixteen pairs of dancers be placed!
Unfortunately, these stumps and tunnels were made by people specifically to show how big redwoods are, and to earn a lot of money from it. Happiness is that giants are extremely tenacious: they can be mutilated, but it is very difficult to kill.
We decided to cut down one of the tallest sequoias specifically for the exhibition - it didn't work: the saws became blunt very quickly. Then the powerful drills went into action. For almost a month, five workers tried to pierce the trunk from different sides. But even then the tree did not fall.
The sequoia collapsed to the ground only after a flurry of hurricane wind hit its riddled body. The impact was like an earthquake. The trunk fell apart into several pieces, and the branches cut deep into the ground. It was not possible to take the fallen giant out of the forest. Only the bark stripped from it was delivered. In San Francisco, a huge circular room seven meters high was assembled from it. Inside, they put a piano and arranged seats for 40 spectators.
Alas, the bullying of the sequoias did not end there. Lumberjack Trask decided to enrich himself by robbing a tree that was known as the Mother of the Forest. He hammered iron staples into the trunk to get to the top, and then removed the bark from the tree and sent the "tree clothes" to London.
Usually trees without bark will die. The mother of the forest survived. She towered over the tops of trees, reproaching people with her appearance for their greed and unjustified cruelty. And now, many years later, Americans are blushing when they remember Trask's monstrous act.
Redwoods are kind to people, and there is no need to disfigure them at all. Hunter Smith once discovered a huge hollow in the trunk of a sequoia. It was formed when a fire was raging in the forest. The fire burned out a 35-meter mainsail in the trunk. It was in it that Smith settled. For three years he enjoyed his unprecedented apartment. But one day a hurricane struck.
The hunter sat like a squirrel in a hollow, shaking with fear. Huge trees fell nearby. A sequoia with a burnt trunk could also not stand it - to collapse and bury the hunter hiding in it. However, she survived: she had not experienced such storms over the past thousand years!
I must say that new trees appear very rarely, but, on the other hand, no one has seen how redwoods die of old age. This is exactly what Ross, the chief forester of the Redwood National Park in California, wrote: “No one has ever seen a giant redwood tree dying of old age. The same trunks that are resting on the ground fell not because of age, but because of a natural disaster."
Yes, sequoias, like gods, can live for a very long time, and if you compare with the brevity of human life, then we can say that it is forever! Their age is equal to the life of entire states. For example, in one American museum there is a cut from a tree with annual rings. Each ring is marked with dates and events in the life of the United States.
When the Viking boats arrived on the shores of America, this tree was already standing. At the time of Columbus, it was already gigantic. In the White House, presidents succeeded each other, and the sequoia continued to grow and, perhaps, did not even know about the existence of people who someday would pick up its fallen trunk from the ground, cut it into pieces and display it in a museum.
In a word, the very sight of this tree, its grandeur and age, it would seem, should inspire people with respect, but for a long time they tried to saw them with power saws, and when they failed, they blew them up with dynamite.
The most annoying thing about this barbarism is that the soft sequoia wood is not good for anything: you can only cut pegs from it or make matches. Well, the forest patriarchs were blown up for this purpose as well. Or they made souvenirs from them. Trinkets, carved from the body of the "World Tree", are willingly bought by tourists.
The giant sequoias have a relative - the evergreen sequoia, or, as the Americans call it, redwood. Its girth is smaller, and its age is more modest ("only" some two and a half thousand years), but they are higher: one hundred and ten meters for them is not a record at all.
And yet - red trees are worried about procreation. Up to five million cones are grown on one tree: what if one of them survives and becomes a giant tree? And even fallen to the ground, dead red trees give green growth.
Well, if people don't blow up sequoias with dynamite, then maybe our great-great-great-grandchildren will also admire them.