The last time that I was at Big Basin Redwoods State Park, I was four years old. The redwood trees had been so tall, so many, and so thick that I had scarcely noticed them. I felt dwarfed just by my parents and their friends. Here was I, so little, so little I could use the kitchen table as a fort, and they so big they could get into the freezer without a stepstool. And they went on and on talking about the trees and about the other mysterious questions that parents address from their stratospheric elevation. My job as a kid, I had felt, was to squeeze out of their shadow.
There was a tree that had a black cave at its base where the trunk had hollowed out. I snuck into the cave. Out its back door, I could see a running creek, and I ran to it. My father had often pulled strange and interesting creatures out of running water. Once it had been a huge biting larva, once a huge biting crayfish. It seemed that everything that came out of such water was big and it bit. This frightened but also excited me.
I was dabbling in the cold water, pulling up nothing but pebbles, when I heard a deep voice say something inarticulate behind me, and I was lifted up by my underarms. My father threw me up with a spin, so I was facing him when he caught me again. “There you are, young sprout,” he said. “You shouldn’t run off like that!” He was trying to look stern, but he was doing a bad job of it. I smiled at him.
Sixty years later, I was back at Big Basin. We had dropped my father’s ashes a decade earlier from a tugboat in San Francisco Bay near Angel Island and my mother’s much earlier than that—far too early—on the Pacific shore just outside the Golden Gate. Likely, both of them now had circumnavigated the Pacific Rim. And here I was, one of the big people, actually noticing the trees and wondering about their size and age and their habit—very odd for a conifer—of regrowing in immense fairy rings. My own children were now adults, and I think I am shrinking, so I am not exactly in the position my father was in. I am more a granddad, and an admirer of the persistence and the unruliness of sprouts.
It was about two weeks before Christmas, and thank god it was rainy, breaking California´s drought. As I climbed up onto Skyline Drive, the old highway that reaches 3000-feet elevation on top of the Coast Range, I drove straight into the clouds. This is the way that redwoods like it: live in the cloud in winter and in the fog in summer. The rest of the time it can be as dry as it likes. This explains why 65 million years ago redwoods were common across the whole joined continents of North America and Eurasia, and survive now only in a thin band along the Pacific Coast and a valley enclave in China. This cloud life, once common in the warmer world of the past, is now rare. On a ridge, I passed a sign that read “Cloud’s Rest.” Yes. When you drive in this weather, you feel rather as though you were a tide-pool creature, with the roiling swirl of the waves above your head, sometimes a little higher, and sometimes a little lower, a sinuous roof of frosted glass.
I felt lonely, so I turned on talk radio. It had been so long since I lived here that I did not recognize the station or know the male/female duo who were bantering along. They were talking about cutting Christmas trees. The male had recently done it. He had managed the truck, while his wife had spoken to the tree farmers. “The wife got the Talk,” he remarked. “ ‘Leave a few whorls of branches at the bottom,’ they said.” The female host laughed. “What the heck for?” she asked. “I don’t know,” he replied. “Do they sprout from the top again?” He reflected a moment. “Weird!” he breathed into the microphone, and went on to the next topic.
Instinctively, I agreed with him, since conifers generally do not resprout from the base. But I had the sense he thought it would be weird for any tree to sprout. And it is indeed a practice among some Christmas tree growers to keep stumps with living whorls of branches. Although the stump will seldom sprout, the branches in the lowest whorls will turn upward toward the sky. Selecting the best of these, the grower can get another Christmas tree from the same roots. Some call them limb trees, and they take two or three years fewer to mature than would new seedlings. A few customers demand that their new Christmas tree come from the same roots as their old one. Not a bad wish. Here too was a way that the ancient conifers could persist, sprouting, as it were, without sprouting. The redwoods were an enormous exception.
The top of Skyline was meadow balds for a good way south from San Mateo. Then the trees closed in. You had to turn right down the hill on the ocean side to get to Big Basin. Just off the crests the redwoods began, thickening in the creek bottoms. Often they appeared one by one, but as I descended a pattern started to form. Three, six, eight, even twelve or fifteen trees appeared in groups. Sometimes, they formed the spokes of a wheel, with the rotting stub of an old stump at the hub. Sometimes, there was no hub, only a depression in the ground. Sometimes, the wheel was broken. Sometimes, there were all or parts of several concentric circles, the inner ones with much thicker trees than the outer ones.
I wondered what my radio host would think here. Really weird! I have seen fairy rings of trees all over the world, including the self-coppiced basswood near my home in upstate New York. As the parent dies or declines—and sometimes even before it shows any signs of stress—new young specimens sprout from the old trunk’s edges, all around it. A lignotuber is the reason, the special organ that some trees have. From the moment the seedling is a brand-new thing, in the axils of the very first leaves, called the cotyledons, dormant buds begin to form. They proliferate as the tree grows, forming a solid, durable, and self-renewing ring of embryonic new trees around the base of the old one.
Redwoods sprout again from the base prolifically, dependably, repeatedly, millennially. A circle of them looks just like a fairy ring of mushrooms, only some of the sprouts are more than 200 feet tall and themselves hundreds of years old. In 1977, loggers found a redwood lignotuber that was forty-one feet in diameter and weighed more than 525 tons. What must have been the size of the tree at whose base it had been. Never mind the seven huge trees it now supported!
There was a narrow, barely paved road called the Big Basin Highway that led into the park. Erosion had pulled soil off some of the banks, exposing the roots of redwoods. There were times when I seemed to be driving into the world of the dirt. I have always wanted to see that hidden world, out of which all life comes. As beautiful and unique as may be the tops of the redwood trees—hiding, among other things, the nests of the diminutive marbled murrelet and strange leaves specifically adapted to face the sun—I have always been more interested in the mystery close at hand.
It started right in the parking lot. I did not feel too different than I had as a four-year-old. The tops and even the midsections of the trees were lost in the clouds. The average redwood around the parking area had a diameter and a height greater than the 139-foot tulip tree that I take care of in the Bronx, and that is the second tallest tree in New York City. Redwoods top out at more than 375 feet, almost three times what to me is the breathtaking elevation of our tulip tree.
The more remarkable thing about them, however, was not their size. It was the geometry they made on the forest floor. The redwoods were constantly squaring the circle. Not content to sprout once from the base, many of these continued sprouting, creating generations of the same kind of concentric rings I had seen as I entered the forest. Right by the parking lot was a marvelous example. It was a full ring of sixteen sprouts. The biggest three were each more than five feet in diameter, many were three to four feet in diameter, a few were only eighteen inches in diameter and there was a baby that was six inches in diameter, another one four inches. Elsewhere on the trails, I found examples where the largest was six or eight feet in girth and the smallest three inches. The biggest of these trees was certainly more than eight hundred years old, and the amazing thing was that they were sprouts from previous ancient trees. How far back did their line stretch unbroken?
Even the biggest oldest trees in the place were likely sprouts from vanished elders. One called Father of the Forest had its own plaque, bragging about its size. It was 16 feet 10 inches in diameter at breast height when they measured it for the sign, and stood 250 feet tall. If you looked at the base, however, you could see that the pattern of its roots on the ground suggested that they had once been part of the circumference of a circle of roots. In other words, it had been one among a fairy ring of redwoods that had surrounded a more ancient tree. If this tree were more than a thousand years old, what if it had grown from another that was a thousand years old? And so and so on back in time. Somewhere in the redwood forests perhaps there was an unbroken chain of filiation for 64 million years.
A fairy ring of resprouted redwood trees.
Not all the geometry was radial, however. Often, when a young stem fell to the ground, it sprouted where it fell, creating a linear grove of new progeny. In a wonderful story about the redwoods subtitled “Immortality Underground,” the botanist Peter del Tredici included a picture of a twenty-inch-diameter trunk lying on the ground, with half a dozen eight- to 12-inch-diameter trunks emerging from it in a line as straight as a ray of sunshine. As I walked around Big Basin, I found two young trunks that had been broken by falling branches in recent storms. On the ground, these trunks had already responded by giving birth to two or three dozen sprouts each. A new sprout can grow six feet in a year. Many of these young’uns would likely die, but it was not impossible that were I to make it back here during my dotage (god willing) a couple of decades from now, I would find two straight lines of tall redwoods making their way toward the canopy top.
Redwoods don’t sprout only from the bottom. Great bulbous masses form above wounds on the trunk and gradually drip until they reach the soil, where they can root and return new trees. They look like boiling water frozen in midboil, as if the trunk were roiling with dormant sprouts. When I was a kid, people would harvest chunks from these burls and put the cut ends in water. They sprouted as reliably as avocado pits, and in fact in our house the two sat side by side on the windowsill, everyday miracles. You could buy chunks of burl in most of the roadside gift shops in redwood country. People now are much more careful with the trees, since there are far too many people and too few trees, but the burl is yet another way in which the redwood absolutely refuses to die.
A straight line of redwood sprouts arising from a fallen trunk.
While I got out of my car at Big Basin, the clouds settled lower, until I was inside them, as though the frosted glass had decided to include me, like a scene in a paperweight. I remembered arguments my father and I used to have while tide-pooling or hiking. “It’s raining!” I would complain, flipping drops off the peak of my raincoat hood. “No,” he would insist, “it’s just heavy fog.” Whatever it was, it was wet and misty. Reluctantly, I started to walk, but in less than a minute I had forgotten the discomfort.
There was a big full-color sign at the trailhead touting the “Amazing Ever Living Redwood Tree.” The copy did not even mention the just as amazing thing standing right behind it. The entry had a canopy, like rainbows arching over the trail. It wasn’t made by hands. Two canyon live oaks—plants that normally open into a bouquet of multistem tree—had here instead leaned out of the shade in which they had sprouted, making an archway directly over the trailhead. The average light penetration in the redwood forest is only 12 percent of what it is at the summit of the canopy, so resourcefulness is at a premium. Leaning out into the relatively bright space cleared for our passage, the two wooden rainbows had each released four stems from their top sides. These upright sprouts, using the parent branches as a launching pad, had grown up and out like eight new trees. It was an arboreal welcome portal to what turned out to be the paradise of sprouts.
In some ways, the redwoods were the least of it. They were the dominants, the big winners, easily five times taller than their nearest competitors. Nothing could grow in their fairy rings and few things directly under the shadow of their boughs. The creativity of the forest that indeed had grown up among them was as astonishing as the redwoods themselves. My four-year-old self felt a great affinity with these dwarves that had found a way to thrive among the giants, in just the way that I had, by getting out of their shadow.
Consider Notholithocarpus, the tan oak. I started walking off trail, and as soon as I did I found my boots tangled in an ivylike mass of leaves. I thought it was ivy, but what was it doing there? No, the leaves were large, oblong, slightly leathery, and had sharp little drip tips arranged around their edges. This ground cover was tan oak, putatively a tree that grows to heights of eighty feet or more, but here about six inches off the ground.
As I followed it, I learned what it was up to. It would stay close to the ground until it found a light gap. It might be the trail edge, or the border of a stream, or a spot where a taller tree like a redwood had fallen. There it would shoot up toward the light. Like as not, the promised light would turn out to be a chimera, or at least in a different direction than first surmised. The trunk would change direction to fine-tune its approach to the life-giving radiance. The tan oak could make living boughs as the live oak had, but some of these boughs were severely bent, like hog backs. Fresh stems jumped up from these. In other circumstances, it might realize that it had really gone wrong, or perhaps a new fall had blocked its source of sun. In such cases, the trunk might suddenly shift, growing out straight sideways at a slightly rising angle, rather as Joyce imagined Leopold Bloom, ascending into heaven “at an angle of 45 degrees . . . like a shot off a shovel.” When it felt the radiance increase, it might release a bud straight up to reach it, the new bud taking almost all the tree’s energy, and the old crown thinning and declining. It was very likely miming what the first broadleaf plants had done inside the conifer-dominated forests of the early Cretaceous.
Then there was the California huckleberry. It was a shrub, so it liked to spread from the base, not from the tips. You could draw a light map of the forest in the Waddell Creek drainage by mapping the course of spreading huckleberry across the ground, as it sent up one after another new shoots from the root crowns. Its cheerful little bright green leaves and its white flowers produce tasty black berries, even in the shade of redwoods, where it loves to grow. The groves of the huckleberry were never much more than six or eight feet tall at most, but they spread in winding paths over acres of ground. I am not sure if anyone has ever tried to see how many clones compose this dense understory or how old they are, but a huckleberry along the Juniata River near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, stretches through the woods for a mile and is claimed by some to be more than thirteen thousand years old.
One of the most beautiful opportunists in the redwood forest was the native azalea, Rhododendron occidentale. It rose only twelve or fifteen feet tall and was daintier than its neighbors the tan oak and huckleberry, more likely to get elbowed out. Still, it was among the most common plants in the understory on my walk. Wherever it was wet on the ground and there was even a little extra light, its colonies of straight stems rose, topped in early winter by yellow whorls of leaves that fluttered to the ground as I watched them. In early spring, it had white or pink flowers borne before the leaves emerged, and it emitted a delicate fragrance. It is one of the parents of the hybrid Exbury azaleas, but long before it was an ornamental, it had everyday uses and medicinal uses for the Indians who lived in and near the redwoods.
The more I walked, the more I saw. It was a landscape of broad brushstrokes and skyrockets, the shrubs covering any even slightly sunny ground and the trees jumping up to fill any gap made by a trail, a stream, a tree fall, a road, a parking lot. It was the paradise for sprouting organisms. Where in my adopted eastern woodlands I find many sprouts that come from seedlings chewed down or knocked down by a branch fall or reduced by a pest, here it was hard to tell in what deep of time there may have been seedlings here. Everything, it seemed, came from a brother or sister, growing a bud on a stem or from the roots. How old and how long has the land existed? Did it stretch back to the Cretaceous? Were these the last strongholds of plants that once stretched from California to southern China? The fog settled down on all of us, and there we were, a scene in a paperweight: the paradise of sprouts.
The redwood forest is not pristine. It is rather the product of continual regeneration, unending succession. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “old growth.” In the twentieth century, fire had been largely suppressed in the redwood forests, but prior to that, fire had been frequent, very frequent. Del Tredici related fire scars on older trunks to the successive rings of sprouts around them at Big Basin and determined that prior to European contact, fires likely occurred here every twenty-five years at least. In 1992, Mark Finney and Robert Martin found by counting fire scars on ancient stumps that from about the fourteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, the trees there had suffered burning every six to twenty-three years. (Many sprouted again from the base or from a burl, but some simply resprouted prolifically up and down the stem, creating leafy fire columns.) A few showed fire scars every two years. While in ancient times the ability to sprout may have been a response to lightning fires, the ability was certainly honed by millennia of contact with humans. The peoples who occupied California at that time burned the land frequently (see page 213), to renew their food plants, to open the country for game, and to coppice small plants to get straight new stems. In fact, the redwood forests as we see them are as much the artifact of this millennial relationship as of random seasonal fires.
The Indians used the redwood forest. They ate the understory huckleberries, worked the huckleberry and azalea stems into arrows and baskets, and made a porridge of the tan oak acorns and a medicinal poultice of its bark. They split out redwood boards with elkhorn wedges to make houses and sometimes even lived in the great hollow bases of the trees. The Indians fired patches of forest to get fresh hazel stems, huckleberry, spruce roots, redwood sprouts, and bracken ferns. They also maintained what the whites called “prairies.” These open spots might be on hillsides or on summits, and in each the forest stood back, making room for grass, ferns, sunflowers, and other herbaceous plants. The uninstructed might nearly die of starvation in the deep forests, unless they came upon one of these prairies, where edible plants and deer, elk, and bear were plentiful. The Indians knew the way from prairie to prairie as well as they knew their own names. Their idea of a healthy woodland was one in which they were active participants. They made their life out of what it gave them.