Giant sequoias are a rapidly growing feature of the UK landscape

I live in a mixed coast redwood forest where the mixed part is a smattering of Doug firs and a dappling of bigleaf maples, tanoaks, and California bay laurels along the creeks and ravines. It's mostly redwoods though, including several large apex groves with walking distance. My two exceptionally big trees are 250 feet tall, and one is a redwood and the other a Doug fir. The redwood is 7 feet diameter and straight as a pole while the Doug fir has four large bends has had a stable 20 degree lean for at least 70 years. It's just shy of 6 foot diameter at breast height.

Over the 15 years we've been here about 50 large trees (200' plus) have come down within hearing distance and probably 10 within scare us distance. (these trees weigh as much as a locomotive and would do to your home and you inside what you might imagine a locomotive falling from a couple hundred feet might when do. And at 200+ feet tall, hard to get distance from them, we certainly don't with multiple 200+ beasts within a baseball's throw. My sampling is that 80% of the trees that have come down in the forest around us are Doug firs. They've got a more substantial tap root but they lack the interlocking wide spread of shallow roots that let the redwoods support each other in the high winds that take out trees on our mountain sides when the ground goes from too dry to too wet and vice versa. Also, when a Doug fir comes down, perhaps 20% of the time it's a break where redwoods are all uprooted. Doug firs snap when redwoods can lean and bend.

I wonder if this is one of the mechanisms by which redwoods attain apex status like the many unspoiled groves around here where Doug firs are rare. Our tiny piece of the redwood forest is all new growth since the mow that started in the 1840s and exploded in the 1860s mostly calming by the 1920s and a trickle by the 1990s.

That makes most of the trees in the 100,000 or so acres of surrounding redwoods 100 to 200 years old. They reside in half a dozen 5,000 to 20,000 acre forests in public and private preserves and a few thousand acres in private use, including logging. Each of the preserved forest sections contain multiple groves left uncut in the era of the timber barons and these groves, two good ones within a mile of me include many of the tallest trees in the world.

In my hikes I've realized that the big ones are almost all pretty "hard to get" and that's probably why they survived. Logging in the 1800s was animal and steam powered and moving these chonky trees, even cut into 50 and even 100 ton sections was a big challenge for the horse/mule/oxen (probably 75%) and steamdogs (maybe~25%) that hauled them uphill (downhill included water and water+steam in the mix). The mills were all close by on streams, one famous mill and terminus of a significant 19th century cross mountain road, the eastern leg which still bears his name and is a major artery on the peninsula is about 1,000 feet from the edge of our property. They cut those giants all down to shingles in mills on this side of the mountain in two waves and dragged them up and over to the bay to redwood city and palo alto where the shingles were barged up to build and glorify San Francisco. Take note if you're ever driving around and admiring the turn of the century architecture in the Bay Area, all those shingles are redwood. To me much of looks like the display of so many elephant tusks or other trophies of human extermination efforts. In San Francisco lies this once great forest of the last remnants of of Jurassic trees. (I believe Monkey puzzle trees are less restricted and older and ginkgos are even older and even more widespread. Those trees are our OGs and we should care for them.)

Our plot is small, just a few acres, but it's surrounded by tens of thousands of acres of state and local parks on all sides. We've got about 100 coast redwoods and a dozen large Douglas firs along with the other local trees that gird the two year round streams that border our property on three sides. My big tree is 255 feet tall at last measure and precisely 7 foot DBH. That one lives on the creek and his girth is the evidence. Most of my trees are 3-4 foot diameter with maybe 20 in the 4 and 5 foot ranges. The second cut here was in the 19-teens. The first was 1868 and in the teens they made a second harvest and attempts at a few subdivisions for summer getaways and fishing camps (my creek was the best trout fishing in the state before the clear cutting decimated the streams) so my half a dozen chunky ones should be about 150 years old. Certain characteristics of two of them including the largest one, make me think they were there, perhaps not large enough to cut in that first round and spared by local resident harvesters in the second round so they might have a hundred or even two hundred more years on them than the other several in the same size range but with less "patina".

Not matchsticks, shingles and most didn't shatter, only some. they cut them into 24 foot sections and used oxen and horses/mules plus steamdogs to move them to nearby mills that cut them down to shingles and they were shipped over the mountains to towns and larger waterways where they became things like the city of San Francisco.

Please do not spread the matchsticks myth. It's insulting the trees and to to San Francisco and other impressive mausoleums of these once noble organisms.