The survival tricks of the coast redwood — drinking fog from the air, shallow interlocking roots, fireproof tannin-rich bark, and cloning from burls into family circles.
Now let me tell you how a tree gets to be a thousand years old and the size of a rocket, because every bit of it is clever. Four tricks. Watch for them as we walk.
First, water. A redwood this tall can't pull water all the way up from its roots on the hottest days — physics won't allow it. So it cheats. On summer mornings, when the fog pours in off the ocean and hangs in this canyon, the needles high up comb the moisture right out of the air and drink it directly, and drip the rest down onto their own roots. In the dry season, as much as a third of the water this forest gets doesn't fall as rain at all — it's fog, caught by the trees. That coastal fog is why redwoods grow here and nowhere inland.
Second, the roots. You'd expect a tree this tall to drive a deep taproot. It doesn't. A redwood's roots go down only six to twelve feet — but they spread out sixty, a hundred feet wide, and they reach out and grip the roots of their neighbors underground. They hold each other up. A redwood doesn't stand alone; it stands in a crowd, hands linked.
Third, fire. That thick, spongy bark is loaded with tannins — the same bitter stuff in strong tea — and it barely burns. Fire sweeps through, chars the outside, clears out the competition, and the redwood shrugs and keeps growing. Look for blackened hollows at the base of the big ones; those trees caught fire, kept living, and are standing here centuries later.
Fourth — and look for this one — redwoods can clone themselves. When a giant falls or burns, a ring of new trees sprouts from its living root crown, in a perfect circle around where the parent stood. They're called family circles, or fairy rings. Walk through one and you're walking through a single tree that has been alive, in one body or another, for thousands of years. That's how a redwood lives forever.
Photo: Famartin · CC BY-SA 4.0
