Tall Trees

Richard Preston has a long piece in the February 14, 2005, issue of the New Yorker on the tallest trees in the world, the coastal redwoods of Northern California. Preston's writing is almost painfully matter-of-fact, but he arrays a staggering amount of reportage and science in conveying the immense size and complexity of these amazing trees, which are less like your backyard pine tree than they are like islands or continents, if not planets.

Here's the magazine's blurb on it, which unfortunately sensationalizes the article:

Richard Preston on going up more than three hundred feet into a tree with the botanist Steve Sillett (“Climbing the Redwoods,” p. 212), who was the first scientist to map the canopy the two-thousand-year-old redwoods create, which turned out to be very different from the way scientists envisioned it. Preston reports that “on July 30, 2000, an amateur redwood researcher...discovered what is currently believed to be the world’s tallest tree.” Now measuring three hundred and seventy feet and two inches, it is currently growing roughly four inches a year. Of climbing these enormous trees, Sillett says, “The thing I fear most is a falling branch that hooks on my rope. It would slide down the rope into me, and it would tear through my body cavity.”

If you have even the slightest interest in the natural world, the article is well worth the price of the issue - which also contains a half-dozen other great articles.