William Gibbons and Descendants of the Original Redwoods

The coast redwoods you see today are not descendents of the old growth stands; these were planted here for Arbor Day in 1947. As naturalist William P. Gibbons said of the Sausal Creek headwaters above Dimond Park, "But for the sad havoc wrought there forty years ago by lumbermen and wood choppers, these Oakland Hills at the point indicated might still have presented one of the noblest natural parks conceivable," he wrote. "Imagine a tree stump thirty feet across. How tall was that tree before it fell? Over how many millenia did it grow? Gibbons, one of the founding members of the California Academy of Sciences, asked these questions when he saw a "sea of stumps" in the Oakland hills. Coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) contain tannins that resist rot, making their wood valuable for construction and woodworking. However, a felled redwood is not lost forever. Redwoods can grow from seeds, but often they vegetatively reproduce, or clone, from stumps or fallen branches, creating a "fairy ring" of new growth around the original stump.