The giant sequoia is different. Mammoth tree. Giant sequoiadendron: description

Which tree is the tallest? Experts have calculated that the roots and vessels of a tree cannot lift water from the soil higher than 130 meters - this is the theoretical limit for tree growth in height. The tallest tree today (112.7 meters) is an evergreen sequoia growing in California.

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National Park Sequoia National Park is located in the southern Sierra Nevada, California. The area of ​​the park is 1635 sq km. Established in 1890 for the purpose of protecting forest areas formed by redwood trees.

It is famous for the fact that on its territory there are the highest, giant trees redwoods. They got their name in honor of the Cherokee Indian leader Sequoia. The park has mountainous terrain, rising from an altitude of about 400 m above sea level in the foothills, to the summit of Mount Whitney, the highest in the contiguous 48 states, at 4,421.1 m.

The park with redwood trees is a unique exclusive of nature, in short. The first impression is as if you and everyone around you were shrunk with the help of an invention crazy professor. After wandering through such a forest for several hours, you can very well imagine the ancient and mysterious eternal forest in which Tolkien’s Tom Bombadil lived.

The park is located quite high in the mountains, about 2000m above sea level:

The park's most popular tree is the General Sherman tree, which is located in the Giant Forest. Exactly this a big tree in the world, whose height is 81 meters, the diameter at the base is about 32 meters, and the age is about 3 thousand years. The Forest of Giants contains five of the ten largest trees in the world by timber volume. The forest is connected by the Generals Road to Grant Grove in Kings Canyon National Park, where another attraction of the park is located - the General Grant tree.

Tunnel Log is a small road tunnel cut right in the middle of a giant sequoia tree that has fallen onto the road.

Sequoia National Park is also famous for its caves, the number of which reaches up to 250. The length of one of them is 32 kilometers in length. The Crystal Cave is the second largest and the only one that is open to tourists. Sequoia National Park is attractive with mountain landscapes, beautiful waterfalls and alpine meadows. The park is home to many species of animals, including moose, American black bear, white-tailed deer, coyote, and lynx.

Sequoias - these giant trees are represented by two species - the evergreen sequoia and the giant sequoia or mammoth tree. Their height reaches up to 100 meters and their diameter up to 10 meters. Redwoods are known for their age—the tree can live up to 4,000 years. The unique combination of age, size and weight of these trees makes them the largest living creatures on Earth today. And this is one of the few trees that has adapted to forest fires. giant sequoia second in life expectancy only to bristlecone pines, which are found in the arid Sierra Nevada mountains.

There are redwoods, and there are mammoth trees. Both are huge in size. They are easy to distinguish from each other. A mammoth tree looks like a huge sprouted log, standing upright:

Californian sequoia is slimmer and taller than its counterpart and its silhouette is more reminiscent of a spruce. In the photo there is a mammoth tree (on the left) and a redwood bush (in the depths on the right).

Comparative Facts About Mammoth Tree and California Redwood

Mammoth tree Californian sequoia

up to 94.5 meters Height up to 111.5 meters
up to 3200 years Tree age up to 2000 years
up to 1200 tons Weight up to 720 tons
up to 79 cm Bark thickness up to 30.5 cm
up to 2.4 meters Branch diameter up to 1.5 meters
up to 12 meters Base diameter up to 6.6 meters
only by seeds Reproduction by seeds or shoots
the size of cereals Seed size is about the size of a tomato seed
ovoid Crown ellipsoidal
small, overlapping single needles, falling off in branches
each other, awl-shaped

A living redwood that has been knocked down will continue to try to grow using its shoots. If nothing prevents this, the shoots facing upward will turn into independent trees, and many groups of redwood trees got their start in this way. A “cathedral” or family of trees is precisely the trees that have grown from the undead remains of the trunk of a fallen sequoia, and since they have grown around the perimeter of the former stump, they form a circle. Another way to survive is through the redwoods. Their growth is hampered chemicals, which is produced living tree. If a tree begins to die, or simply ends up in unfavorable conditions, for example, as a result of drought or forest fire, then the production of such substances decreases, and the influx is covered with green shoots. Finally, sequoia has a traditional method of propagation by seeds. About 20% of today existing trees grew from seeds. The rest are the result of one method or another vegetative propagation. If you connect these facts, you realize that some of these trees may represent a continuous sequence of growth of the same organism over 20 or 30 thousand years (or even more), reproducing itself vegetatively over and over again. Genetically, it will be the same tree that grew from a seed many centuries ago! Would it be correct to estimate the age of one of these trees based on the true age of the genetic material remaining unchanged? I don't know, but these amazing trees seem truly eternal.

Thick fogs are an everyday occurrence on the coast where it lives. California sequoia, and we can say that it not only grows wildly in such conditions, but literally needs these mists. These hundred-meter giants receive moisture from there for their needles at the top, where the vascular system can no longer pump it. average temperature at 10-15°C, prevailing in this area, is also important for life cycle sequoia. These two conditions - temperature and humidity - are the limiters that determine the modern range of these amazing giants. But, if they are planted artificially, they can grow in the most different places, for example, in Fresno (California), Waycross (Georgia), Florida and even Phoenix (Arizona). Although without coastal fogs and coolness, which feed them and at the same time restrain the growth of competing species, such as pine, they will never reach their true size and stature.

Video of a tour of the park:

Sem. taxodiaceae
Sequoiadendron giganteum

Giant Sequoiadendron or mammoth tree- a giant evergreen coniferous tree of gigantic size, its huge hanging branches resembling the tusks of a mammoth. The most tall tree Nikitsky Botanical Garden.

Its homeland is the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada and warm California. And there, in my homeland, it’s huge evergreen tree reaches 80–100 m heights, since sequoiadendron is a very durable breed (can live up to 5 thousand years). In Nikitsky botanical garden the size of these giants is much more modest than in their homeland, but, nevertheless, the tallest tree in the Garden, reaching 38 meters in height, is the giant sequoiadendron, planted in the Upper Park in 1885. The trunk diameter of this mighty tree is about 2 meters.

This monumental tree has a regular, wide-pyramidal crown. Branching in young trees is very dense; in old trees the trunk is cleared of branches to a height of up to 50 m. The bark is red-brown, in deep cracks, separated by plates. The needles are coarse, hard, dark green with a gray tint. The cones are small (5–8 cm), oblong-ovate. Ripen by the end of the 2nd year.

The breed is slow growing, especially in the first 10–15 years. Quite frost-resistant—tolerates short-term temperature drops down to 24–25°C. It loves loose, deep, fresh soils, but even here in Crimea it does well on calcareous soils.

The wood is soft and not as valuable as that of evergreen sequoia. However, it also does not burn in fire.

The dryness of the summer Crimean air “taught” the tree in especially hot years to partially shed its branches, trying to reduce the area of ​​​​moisture evaporation. Funnel-shaped depressions along the entire trunk are traces of such “undressing.”

Sequoiadendrons were discovered relatively recently, since the mountain slopes of the ridge were inaccessible and only in 1850 the English traveler Labb found the largest trees in the world. First these huge trees were called “California pines” or “mammoth trees”, and later they began to use the designation of the Indians: the word “sequoia” is simply the name of this tree in the Indian language, but the same name was borne by one of the Indian leaders of the Iroquois tribe, the inventor of Indian writing.

In the Nikitsky Botanical Garden - since 1858.

The ancestors of mammoth trees lived on Earth 100 million years ago. Old specimens growing in protected groves of California are listed in the state register under the names: “Thick Tree”, “Three Sisters”, “Pioneer Cabin”, etc. In 1881, while laying a road in Yosemite Park, they were forced to make a tunnel in one of the sequoiadendron trees, through which buses could pass freely.

At the end of the last century, a lightning strike split the trunk of one tree at the base and it collapsed under its own weight. The weight of this trunk is more than 1000 tons. Stump diameter 23 m received the name "Father of the Forest". In 1910, a room was cut out inside the stump and a cozy restaurant was placed in it. A spiral staircase around the stump allows you to climb to the top, where in the summer a quartet plays country tunes, 16 couples dance freely and there is room for 20 spectators around the perimeter.

When I. Ilf and E. Petrov, invited to America, visited Sequoia Park (occupies the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada), they wrote: “... we drove through an ancient dark forest, a fantastic forest, where the word “man” ceases to sound proudly, and only one word sounds proudly - “tree...”, I wanted to imagine that these trees grew peacefully when not only Columbus, but also Caesar, and Alexander the Great, and even the Egyptian king Tutankhamun were not in the world...”

Currently, in its homeland, California, there are no sequoiadendron trees older than 2 thousand years. But according to scientists’ forecasts, they can live up to 6–7 thousand years.

One of the tallest (up to 135 m) trees on the planet is the sequoia, or mammoth tree. In height it is second only to eucalyptus.[...]

The giant sequoiadendron was described in 1853. After the discovery of the mammoth tree by Europeans, its name changed several times. The giant sequoiadendron captured the imagination of the inhabitants of the Old World, and it was given names greatest people. Thus, the famous English botanist D.L.L.I., who first described this plant, calls it Wellingtonia in honor of the English Duke of Wellington, hero of the Battle of Waterloo. The Americans, in turn, proposed the name Washingtonia (or Washington sequoia), in honor of the first US President D. Washington, who led the liberation movement against the British. But since the names Washingtonia and Wellingtonia had already been previously assigned to other plants, in 1939 this genus received the name sec-voyadephdrone.[...]

Modern taxodiaceae include a number the most interesting plants. Among the first is the sequoiadendron or mammoth tree (Sequoiadendron giganteum) - one of the largest and longest-living plants in the world. Second in height only to the evergreen sequoia and one of the species of eucalyptus, in particular the willow eucalyptus (Eucalyptus salicifolia) from Australia, the sequoiadendron undoubtedly exceeds them in trunk thickness. [...]

The climate became more humid, and all the land was overgrown with abundant vegetation. The predecessors of today's cypresses, pines and mammoth trees appeared in the forests.[...]

The most famous representative of taxodia is undoubtedly the famous giant sequoiadendron (Sequoiadendron gigan-teum), also called the mammoth tree because of its gigantic size and the external resemblance of its huge hanging branches to the tusks of a mammoth. In terms of size and anatomical and morphological characteristics, the evergreen sequoia (Sequoia sempervirens) is close to it. Both of these plants were widespread throughout the northern hemisphere during the late Cretaceous and Tertiary periods. The remains of forests with their participation, which once occupied vast spaces, are now preserved only in a limited area of ​​the west North America. Sequoia evergreen still forms quite extensive forested areas on a narrow strip of the Pacific coast from Southwestern Oregon to the Santa Claus Ridge in California (at an altitude of 600-900 m). Giant sequoiadendron in separate small groves (about 30 of them) is found only on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada in California (at an altitude of 1500-2000 m).[...]

If eucalyptus trees are characterized by significant plasticity in adapting to soil conditions, then we can already expect a large variety in the development of eucalyptus stands and tree sizes. Indeed, on the one hand, we meet eucalyptus trees, which surpass in height all other tree species in the world, even sequoia and mammoth wood. On the other hand, in the mountains, on the border of forest vegetation and on poor soils, eucalyptus trees begin to sharply decrease in size and become gnarled, relatively low-growing trees.[...]

However, in Polkarpicho plants, the transition to the formation of reproductive organs does not directly accelerate the aging process, and they have the ability to continue! growth, and the duration of the stages of reproduction and old age is sometimes so long that plants live up to 2000 years (cypresses, yews and cedars) and even up to 5000 years (mammoth trees).[...]

Ontogenesis, or individual development, of plants begins from the moment of fertilization of the egg or the appearance of a rudimentary night in the reproductive organs and tissues of the mother plant and ends with the death of the plant. Thus, ontogeny is full cycle the life activity of a plant, includes all its life processes and manifestations and continues, depending on the type of plant, from 5-6 years for miniature ephemerals to 3-5 thousand years for the giants of the plant kingdom - mammoth trees, cedars and other species.[ .. .]

Ontogenesis (from Greek - existence and origin) - the individual development of an organism from the moment of formation until the natural completion of its life cycle (until death or cessation of existence in its previous capacity). The term was introduced by E. Haeckel in 1866. Ontogenesis is the process of development and implementation hereditary information, embedded in germ cells. In plants in general it depends more on conditions natural environment than in animals. Representatives different types For living organisms, the duration of ontogenesis is not the same (Table 21). Life expectancy intervals fluctuate especially sharply in plants, in particular, long-lived (age up to 4,000-5,000 years) are baobab, dragon tree, mammoth tree (sequoia), bristlecone pine of California, etc. Some arctic plants, despite extreme conditions, live relatively long: the maximum age of a dwarf birch is 80 years, polar willow - 200 years, blueberry - 93 years, etc.

SEQUOIA (Sequoia) – a genus of evergreens coniferous trees family Taxodiaceae. According to one of the classification systems, the Taxodiaceae family belongs to the subclass of Conifers (Pinidae or Coniferae), which, in turn, is included in the class of Conifers or Pinopsida, which belongs to the department of Gymnospermae.

The only species of the genus - the evergreen or red sequoia (S. sempervirens) - is considered the symbol of the US state of California; it is one of the tallest and longest-living trees on Earth, also famous for its beautiful, straight-grained and rot-resistant wood.

The height of the evergreen sequoia is about 90 m, and the record height is 113 m. It was recorded in Redwood National Park in California. The trunk diameter reaches 6–11 m and can increase by 2.5 cm per year. Sequoia has the most valuable wood among taxodiaceae with a red core and pale yellow or white sapwood (sapwood is the layers of wood located between the core and the cambium). The bark of the tree is thick, reddish, and deeply furrowed. The quality of wood varies not only depending on the location of growth, but also within the same trunk. The crown is narrow, starting above the lower third of the trunk. Oval cones and short shoots with flat and bluish-gray needles give the sequoia beauty and splendor. Root system formed by lateral roots that go shallow into the soil.

Sequoia evergreen is one of the longest-living plants on Earth: its life age is more than 2000 years (the oldest known tree is about 2200 years old). Maturity occurs at 400–500 years.

The reproductive organs of sequoia (like all conifers) are strobili - modified shortened shoots bearing special leaves - sporophylls, on which spore-forming organs - sporangia are formed. There are male strobili (they are called microstrobilae) and female strobili (megastrobili). Sequoia is a monoecious plant (microstrobiles and megastrobilians develop on the same tree). Microstrobiles are solitary; they are located on the tips of shoots or in the axils of leaves. Megastrobiles are collected in small oval-shaped single cones. One of the features of sequoia is its ability to produce abundant growth, which does not differ in growth rate and life expectancy from seedlings grown from seeds. The redwood forests in America consist mainly of trees that grew this way.

At the end Cretaceous period and in the Tertiary period, evergreen sequoia, along with other representatives of taxodiaceae, was widespread in the northern hemisphere, but now remnants of forests with its participation are preserved only in a limited area of ​​western North America, namely, on a narrow strip of the Pacific coast from Monterey County in northern California to the river Clearly in southern Oregon. The length of this strip is about 720 km, it is located at an altitude of 600 to 900 m above sea level. Evergreen sequoia needs a very humid climate, so it does not go further from the coast than 32–48 km, remaining within the influence of humid sea air.

Sequoia forests were first discovered by Europeans on the coast Pacific Ocean in 1769. Based on the color of the wood, sequoia then received its name “mahogany” (Redwood), which has survived to this day. In 1847, the Austrian botanist Stefan Endlicher isolated these plants into an independent genus and gave it the name “sequoia” in honor of Sequoyah (Sequoyah, 1770–1843), an outstanding Iroquois leader who invented the Cherokee alphabet.

Because of its excellent wood and rapid growth, sequoia is specially grown in forestry. Light, dense, not subject to rotting and insect attacks, sequoia wood is widely used as a building and carpentry material, used for the manufacture of furniture, sleepers, telegraph poles, railway cars, paper and tiles. The absence of odor allows it to be used in tobacco and Food Industry. It is used to make boxes and crates for cigars and tobacco, barrels for storing honey and molasses. Because of its excellent wood and rapid growth, sequoia is specially grown in forestry. Sequoia is also used as an ornamental plant, bred for this purpose in gardens and parks.

Two other species are close to the evergreen sequoia, each of which is also the only representative of its genus. The first species is the giant sequoiadendron or mammoth tree (Sequoiadendron giganteum); the second species is Metasequoia glyptostroboides.

The giant sequoiadendron or mammoth tree was named so because of its gigantic size and the external resemblance of its huge hanging branches to the tusks of a mammoth. Sequoia evergreen and giant sequoia are similar in appearance, but at the same time they differ from each other in the shape of the leaves, the size of the cones and a number of other characteristics.

Like the evergreen sequoia, giant sequoia was widespread in the northern hemisphere at the end of the Cretaceous and in the Tertiary period, now only about 30 small groves have survived, located on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada in California at an altitude of 1500-2000 m above sea level.

The giant sequoiadendron was described in 1853, but after that its name changed several times. The appearance of the tree so amazed Europeans that they began to give it the names of the greatest people of that time. Thus, the famous English botanist D. Lindley, who first described this plant, named it Wellingtonia in honor of the Englishman Duke of Wellington, hero of the Battle of Waterloo. The Americans, in turn, proposed the name Washingtonia (or Washington sequoia) in honor of the first US President D. Washington, who led the liberation movement against the British. But since the names Washingtonia and Wellingtonia had already been assigned to other plants, in 1939 this plant received its current name.

The giant sequoiadendron is an unusually majestic and monumental tree, reaching a height of 80–100 m with a trunk diameter of up to 10–12 m. It is distinguished by its longevity and can probably live up to 3 or even 4 thousand years.

Because of their durable, rot-resistant wood, sequoiadendrons in their homeland have been rapaciously exterminated since the time of the first explorers. The remaining old trees (and there are only about 500 of them) are declared protected. The largest sequoiadendrons have their own names: “Father of Forests”, “General Sherman”, “General Grant” and others. These trees are real giants of the plant world. It is known, for example, that an orchestra and three dozen dancers can easily fit on the cut of one of them, and cars pass through tunnels made in the lower parts of the trunks of some other trees. One of the largest of these trees, the General Sherman, weighs about 2,995,796 kg.

Sequoiadendron as an ornamental plant is grown in many countries of the world; for example, it has taken root well in parks and gardens in the southwestern part of Europe, where it was brought back in the mid-19th century.

Sequoiadendrons are used not only for decorative purposes. Sequoiadendron wood, which does not rot, is used in construction work, for the manufacture of tiles and fences. Thick tree bark (30–60 cm) is used as linings in fruit containers.