- Coast redwoods, tallest of all trees, grow in northwestern California and southwestern Oregon.Jupiterimages/Creatas/Getty Images
The tallest-known trees in the world are coast redwoods, which inhabit a relatively narrow coastal belt along the Pacific from the San Francisco Bay area to extreme southwestern Oregon. These pillar-trunked trees commonly top 300 feet in height. The tallest yet discovered, named "Hyperion," is roughly 380 feet tall. Such venerable trees may be 2,000 years old or older. - The bulk of redwood country lies within the coastal fog-belt.Jupiterimages/Creatas/Getty Images
Coast redwoods dominate the environments in which they grow, forests that otherwise closely resemble the Northwest coastal forests of Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and southeastern Alaska. Those mountainous, rain-soaked woods don't have redwoods, but they support some of the biggest trees in the world: Douglas-firs, Sitka spruces and western red-cedars. Their distribution roughly coincides with the extent of summer fog off the ocean, an important source of moisture during that season's extended droughts, but some prosper 75 miles from the Pacific. The broad-leaved Pacific madrone (an evergreen) and big-leaf maple (deciduous) flourish in the understory of redwood forests, while conifer associates like Douglas-fir and western hemlock often mingle more modest canopies with their giant neighbors. - A substantially smaller relative of the coast redwood, the dawn redwood, or metasequoia, exemplifies the "living-fossil" status of the Sequoioideae. This handsome tree was long thought extinct until relict stands were discovered in the 1940s in the mountains of west-central China. While their needle form and arrangement resemble those of the coast redwood, metasequoias are deciduous: That is, they drops their leaves during winter. While they prosper only in a small natural range, dawn redwoods are widely cultivated in favorable climates around the world.
- Giant sequoias grow in mid-elevation conifer forests of the western Sierra Nevada.Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images
This robust tree is sometimes called the "Sierra-redwood," due to its similar appearance and taxonomic affinity to the coast redwoods, from which it is separated by the Central Valley of California. Giant sequoias grow only in mid-elevation, mixed-conifer forests of the western Sierra Nevada, forests that also include such hefty trees as sugar pines and Douglas-firs. No other tree approaches the largest sequoias in mass. The 275-foot General Sherman Tree in Sequoia National Park has a stem volume of around 52,000 cubic feet and a 36.5-foot diameter at its base. The tallest sequoias exceed 300 feet in height. Strongly resistant to wildfire, insects and fungal rot, giant sequoias may live well over 3,000 years.
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