Ancient Redwoods & Ralph

 

Giant Redwoods Rise from the Past, with a little help…

 

An ancient redwood forest has to be seen to be believed,
and perhaps believed to be truly seen. 

~ Doris M. Schoenhoff, Mendocino Redwood Company

 

Coastal Redwoods, Sequoia sempervirens, are among the oldest and largest of all living organisms on earth – growing to over 300 feet in height and living for thousands of years. In the age of dinosaurs, their prehistoric relatives inhabited large portions of central and western North America, Greenland, the Spitzbergen archipelago, Europe, and Japan. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, the Redwood’s range was limited to a narrow band of coastal habitat, running from southwestern Oregon to Monterey, California. And when European-Americans arrived, the primeval giants fell, one by one, until only five percent of the redwood forest remained.

When a Coastal Redwood dies, basal shoots emerge in a ‘fairy ring’ around its stump and are nurtured by the decaying remains of the parent tree. The Fieldbrook Giant, located in Humboldt County, CA, was over 32 feet wide at the base and perhaps 2,000 years old when she was logged in 1896. All that remains of this extraordinary tree is a gigantic stump and the saplings that make up her ‘Fairy Ring.’  Game over.

 

By the early 1900s, ninety-five percent of the Coastal Redwoods were gone – and their genetic material died with them. Or did it?

A century after the Fieldbrook Giant fell, Ralph Munro (Washington’s long time Secretary of State), Bob Barnes (retired landscape architect and tree planting advocate), Dave Pearsall (local tree farmer) and many others, joined in a project with the students at McLane Elementary School and began planting trees on a vacated portion of Evergreen Parkway (the entrance road to Evergreen State College in Olympia). The concept was simple – every year, every student at McLane School plants something, from Daffodils to Douglas Fir. Eventually they planted over 16,000 trees, with Ralph and Bob leading the way. In time, it became the McLane School Forest Trail, later renamed the Ralph Munro Trail.  The result is an incredible, biodiverse, and expanding trail system that is used and appreciated by thousands of people.

Then, in 2020 Ralph and Bob were asked to help with a very different tree planting effort – working with the non-profit Archangel Ancient Tree Archive to plant the progeny of the world’s oldest and largest Coastal Redwoods, and the living decedents of the most significant redwoods logged over 100 years ago.

Archangel Ancient Tree Archive is a non-profit located in Copemish, Michigan. Their mission is to propagate the world’s most important “Champion Trees” (the oldest and largest living specimen of a tree species) before they are gone; to archive the genetics of ancient trees in living libraries around the world; and to reforest the Earth with the offspring of these trees to provide the myriad of beneficial ecosystem services essential for all life forms to thrive.  They focus on propagating cuttings from Champion Tees, as well as harvesting living tissue from ‘Fairy Ring’ saplings – genetically identical to their long deceased parent. Yes, from trees that were logged over a hundred years ago, like the Fieldbrook Giant.

The next step, of course, is to grow baby trees. Some of the cuttings thrive in rich soil with a dose of rooting medium. While the tiniest need help through a process called micropropagation. In order to propagate a tree, you need to harvest new growth, or scion wood, from the original plant. In an apple tree the ideal scion wood 12 to 18 inches long. But with an ancient tree, it requires a microscope to find the growth rings. According to Jake Milarch at Archangel, “We’re taking tiny tips and basically multiplying them in vitro. Not down to the cell, but down to a stem the size of this—” he points to a dot on a spread-out map.

These tiny cuttings are initially grown and cared for in sterile vessels. Later, they’re planted in conventional growing containers and spend three or four years in a greenhouse. With luck, 3 to 4 percent of the tiniest cuttings survive long enough to make it into the ground.

Archangel is now distributing thousands of young, healthy Redwoods for planting around the world. In 2020 Ralph Munro and Bob Barnes were asked to help, and they jumped into the project. They committed to distributing 1,000 trees in Western Washington over the 2021-22 planting season. Barnes is enthusiastic about the results, “We’re over 900 trees distributed to various communities. We’ve given a hundred to Olympia Parks. We’ve given trees to Tumwater Parks. To Lacey Parks. We’ve distributed a number of trees to the local tribes. To the Skokomish Tribe, to put in the estuary. Also to the Squaxin Tribe.  I just delivered some trees up to Sequim to the James Town S’Klallam Tribe. And so we’ve distributed over 900 trees of the Coastal Redwood and approximately 300 of the Giant Sequoias. And these all came from Archangel Ancient Tree Archives. And they are providing those at no cost.” Primarily, the trees have gone to entities with room to plant a small grove of colossal trees, and the resources to care for them for generations to come.

Archangel and their volunteers are hoping that this gigantic project educates and inspires people to act – to make positive changes in their daily lives to protect future generations. As Barnes explained, “You know, it’s the right thing to do because we are the keepers of the Seven Generations. In other words, everything that we’re doing, we need to think seven generations down the road. So this is not only for us, this is for our grandchildren and their grandchildren.” 

Others are simply grateful that the magnificent trees of the past have a second chance at life.

And then there’s Ralph Munro, “I guess our outlook is that the climate’s moving north and we better do what we can to give it a whirl.”

 

 

 

Originally written by Elizabeth Munro Berry – April, 2022

 

 

Sources:

Archangel Ancient Tree Archive website at: https://www.ancienttreearchive.org

“Can Redwoods Save the World?”; By Elizabeth Svoboda; Atlas Obscura ; March 5, 2020; at: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/redwood-reforestation

“Fighting Climate Change by Cloning the World’s Oldest Trees”; By Robert Langellier; The Hill; Washington, DC; November 6, 2019; at: https://thehill.com/changing-america/resilience/465444-fighting-climate-change-by-cloning-the-worlds-oldest-trees/

“Redwoods and Dinosaurs”; By Doris M. Schoenhoff, Mendocino Redwood Company; at: www.hrcllc.com/history_project/stories/begin_story.htm#:~:text=There%20is%20evidence%20that%20coast,and%20Velociraptor%20roamed%20the%20earth.

Ralph Munro and Bob Barnes