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Ella M. Sexton - Stories of California
leaves are really used for fans, and, perhaps, the date-palm. This tree was planted round the Missions by
the Padres, and some, more than a hundred years old, are still standing at the San Gabriel Mission. These,
and the magnolia with its large creamy blossoms, as well as the graceful pepper-tree, are natives of
warm, southern lands, while the eucalyptus, or gum-tree, was brought here from Australia.
Look round, children, as you walk to and from school, or in the park, and try to know and name the green
things growing there, the flowers and plants sent to make our world a pleasant place to live in.
THE BIG TREES AND LUMBERING
The largest trees in the world are those forest giants of California which grow on the western slopes of
the Sierra Nevadas, and nowhere else on the globe. People carelessly call these grand trees "redwoods"
or "big trees," but their family name is Sequoia, an Indian chief's name. When the trees were first
discovered, in 1853, accounts of their height and size were sent to England. Supposing this giant to be a
new tree, it was there christened Wellingtonia, and also gigantea for its immense
measurements. While Americans were trying to have it called Washingtonia, a famous
Frenchman who knew all about trees decided that the specimen sent him was certainly a sequoia, as
named by a German professor some six years before this time. So the tree was called sequoia
gigantea and quietly went on growing, unmindful of the four nations who had quarrelled over its
christening. Why, indeed, should it bother its lofty head with the chatter of people whose countries were
unknown when this mighty tree was full grown? For these sequoias are the oldest of living objects and
have probably been growing for four thousand years. How do we know this? Well, when a fallen trunk is
sawed across, one can see rings in the wood, and it is thought that each ring is a year's growth. John Muir
counted over four thousand of these annual rings on the stump of one of the Kings River trees.
These fine old trees grow in groves, and of the nine or ten groves the Calaveras and Mariposa are the best
known. The Calaveras group of nearly a hundred mighty trees was the first one discovered, and four trees
here are over three hundred feet high. The fallen "Father of the Forest" must have been much higher, for
it measures a hundred feet round its trunk at the root end. A man can ride on horseback for two hundred
feet through its hollow trunk as it lies on the ground. Many of the standing trees hollowed out by fires are
large enough, used as cabins, to live in.
The Mariposa grove of Big Trees, being not far from Yosemite Valley, is the best known, as thousands
of tourists visit both places. There is a big tree at Mariposa for every day in the year, and two very
wonderful ones, the Grizzly Giant and Wawona. Stage-coaches drive into the grove through the tree
Wawona, which was bored and burned out so as to make an opening ten by twelve feet. A wall of wood
ten feet thick on each side of this opening supports the living tree. The great Grizzly Giant towers a
hundred feet without a branch, and twice that height above the first immense branches that are six feet
through. This was, no doubt, an old tree when Columbus discovered America, yet it is alive and green
and still growing.
The largest tree in the world is the General Sherman, in Sequoia National Park, and it is thirty-five feet in
diameter. This means that the stump of the tree, if smoothed off, would make a floor on which thirty
people might dance, or your whole class be seated. You can scarcely imagine what a mighty column such
a tree is, with its rich red-brown bark, fluted like a column, too, and with its crown of feathery green
branches and foliage. The bark is a foot or two thick. The trees are evergreens, and conifers, or
cone-bearers. Sequoia cones are two or three inches long and full of small seeds. The Douglas squirrel
gets most of these seeds, but there are still seedlings and saplings or young trees enough to keep the race
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