WORLD'S TALLEST TREE

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 148, 20 December 1930, Page 25

WORLD'S TALLEST TREE

How high is the tallest tree in the world? The answer to this question seems to depend on who saw it, and how far away it was from home. Stories are current to-day about trees in the "back reaches of Australia" alleged to exceed 500 feet in height, and reports of trees crowding or exceeding the 400ft mark crop up regularly in the forestry journals. Measurements by a well-known forester gave 363 feet as the height of a redwood growing in Bull Creek Flat, California. This is the tallest tree in the world on which there is authentic and reliable information. Even 3(iO feet is a lot of tree; if you can hit a baseball that far you sau kit tame wins

in a number of major league ball parks. To make a really good tree story a true story is often difficult. A member of tJio staff of Forest Products Laboratory, Madison, Wisconsin, who spent a year in Australia not long ago, used the opportunity to check up on some of the basic, facts. The tallest Australian tree he actually measured was 310 feet, and ho satisfied himself that the tallest tree ever measured with accuracy in that country was a Eucalyptus rcgnans or "mountain ash" that grew at Colac, Victoria, and was 346 feet high. A prize offered at the Melbourne Exposition in ISBS for proof of the tallest tree standing at that time was on evidence for a Eucalyptus, 325 feet high.