How to Treat the Coast Redwood Tree

Blair Glenn: I would like to tell you a little story about the tree that we are all very familiar with, the Giant Coast Redwood. In the wild in what is known as an Old Growth Redwood forest, these trees can live to be thousands of years old and have a size that is absolutely unbelievable. Because of this, people recognized this tree to be a long lived, very strong, very durable tree. And rightly so! In the wild, in an old growth forest, this is a remarkable tree. These trees will endure all sorts of hardships and abuse that man can put upon them and still survive. There are stories of these trees that are so large that when they cut them down they will be able to build a dance floor out of this stump or put a whole wagon and a team of horses on top of, just the log itself. In closer to our civilization, we have brought this Redwood tree and used it as an ornamental tree, and it grows very, very fast. It is not uncommon for me to see a redwood tree 36 to 48 inches in diameter that is only 30 or 40 years old. In the wild, a tree of 36 to 48 inches in diameter would be hundreds of years old. Because Redwood tree is a fast growing tree but it is also a sensitive tree. Given the right environment, it grows just amazingly fast. But if you give it something that it may not tolerate such as a high salinity in the water, then, the trees will suffer as in this case, every tree on this project that is being irrigated with recycled water with a high salinity content is dying. Now, I have been cutting down Redwood trees for a long, long time. Unfortunately, they got so big, they seem to lift houses and cause all kinds of damage to foundations and people are frankly, they are afraid of them. They just get too damn big. And I have milled thousands if not hundreds of thousands of board feet of redwood. Both from old growth trees and trees that I cut down in people’s properties. Here is an amazing tree. This tree was about four feet in diameter at the base. And believe it or not, we took this tree down successfully and felled it on top of this lawn across this stumped concrete without doing one bit of damage. That is a whole another story and we are pretty good with what we do. You cannot see the growth rings here but believe me, it was only 26 years old. But what is remarkable is what you cannot see is that large area of decay at the center of the tree. What I find frequently on Redwoods that I milled from valley trees or downhill trees as I liked to call them, is the wood is not durable and it is not decay resistant like an old growth redwood tree or even a second growth Redwood. The trees that live down in the valley grow so fast that their wood is very susceptible to decay. Quite often the trees that I milled down on the valley are virtually useless. The wood is brittle. There is lots of decay pockets and amazingly, there are instability problems in these monsters that a lot of people do not recognize.