Читать книгу The Trees of San Francisco онлайн

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The coast redwood is the tallest tree on Earth, growing easily to more than 300 feet. (The tallest individual tree on Earth—discovered in 2006 and measured at 379 feet—is a coast redwood in Redwood National Park, north of Eureka, California.) These evergreen conifers are densely branched and gracefully pyramidal in shape, with flat, feathery needles and reddish-brown, fibrous bark. The coast redwood’s native range is limited to a thin coastal zone, rarely extending more than 20 miles inland, from Monterey County in the south to extreme southwestern Oregon in the north. Fossils of the coast redwood date back 65 million years to the Cretaceous period, when the tree coexisted with the dinosaurs in North America, Europe, and Asia. As Earth’s climate became cooler and drier, the tree gradually retreated to its current range, where the mild Mediterranean climate and coastal fogs provide the humid environment that redwoods prefer. Although not as long-lived as their relatives the giant sequoias, coast redwoods live a long time: many attain 800 years of age, and some last a millennium. Redwood lumber has always been in great demand for timber, as the wood is durable, decay resistant, and easy to work. Most of San Francisco’s Victorian homes were constructed from redwood. The wood has proven so popular over the years that more than 95% of the old-growth redwood forests have been wiped out, with conservationists scrambling to preserve the rest.