TALL LIVING THINGS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 20, 24 July 1939, Page 10

TALL LIVING THINGS

THE HEIGHT OF TREES

The tallest living thing in Great Britain is, of course, a tree, says the "Manchester Guardian." It is not one of our native trees tout a Douglas fir, an importation from California, now being planted extensively in this country by the Forestry Commissioners. This particular Douglas is at Powis Castle, Welshpool, and though it was planted only 90 years ago it has already attained a height of 175 feet. That is to say, that it is nearly half as high again as the tallest of flourishing oaks, which are sometimes as much as 400 years old and even more.

But compared with the height which these trees reach in their native California this Douglas fir is a mere undersized stripling. In 1895 one was felled near Vancouver which measured as much as 417 feet in height. It would considerably have overtopped the 340----foot tower of our Houses of Parliament. Its age was estimated at 1800 years. There is no recorded tree of such [vast height now standing, but eucalyptus trees in Australia have been felled 1 that measured a full 525 feet. These were the tallest trees known to man The tallest tree now living, however, belongs to neither of these | species. It is a Sequoia semoervirens, jor redwood, also a native of California, j and it is 374 feet in height.

These trees, however, do not equal in either girth or age their cousins the Giant Sequoia, or Big Tree, as it is popularly known, through ihe base of one of which a road was driven, as the familiar picture of a coach and horses emei'ging from the tunnel shows. Though the highest recorded specimen measured only 272 feet in length, its girth at base was 99 feet, its span 37 feet, its content of timber approximately 50,000 feet, and its age estimated at 4000 years.

But even these gigantic ii-pes do not approach the height to which seaweed will grow. It has been found growing on the bed of the ocean to a height of 650 feet.