Elderflora: a Modern History of Ancient Trees by Jared Farmer

Author:Jared Farmer [FARMER, JARED]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2022-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

AMERICAN MORTALITY

Sequoia history in US time swung between extremes—from sideshow tree parlors to protected groves, from land giveaways to capitalists to land withdrawals for the public. After Congress and the White House, respectively, created Sequoia National Park (1890) and Sequoia National Forest (1893), US conservationists congratulated themselves on protecting the best Big Tree habitat for the forever future. Small-scale buybacks rounded out the effort. For fifteen dollars per acre, the ghostly Converse Basin returned to federal ownership in 1935.

Saved trees could still be imperiled. In the initial view of the NPS (founded in 1916), giant sequoia faced two main threats: tourists and fires. It did something to manage the former, and everything to eliminate the latter. From an ecological historian’s—and a sequoia’s—point of view, rangers got their priorities fatefully wrong.

Tourists had behaved badly in the groves for decades, removing strips of bark, nailing signs to trunks, and climbing onto fragile burls to pose for photographs. The epicenter of concern was the Grizzly Giant, a beastly tree with incomparably gnarled and bulging arms, a leading contender for the title “world’s oldest living thing.” Footfall in Mariposa Grove flattened the tree’s understory to a bare, hard surface, prompting the NPS to erect fences, and to commission a study from a plant pathologist. In his 1927 report, the tree doctor warned about “gradual killing” by “unconsciously predatory” enthusiasts. At the Grizzly Giant, he saw “no possibility of recovery.”43 This alarmist conclusion was seemingly validated by the fall of the Massachusetts Tree, the first giant to tip over since the 1870s.

In the 1930s, rangers responded to the perceived crisis. They constructed fire hydrants in Mariposa, suspended car traffic at the grove’s other drive-thru tree, and rerouted the scenic road away from the Grizzly Giant, now protected by a triple-barbed-wire entanglement. The superintendent of Yosemite National Park, a veteran of World War I, had been influenced by his experience on the Western Front. He adorned his “low German type” barrier with plantings of azalea, ceanothus, and dogwood. With a sign at the grove’s entrance, the superintendent admonished visitors to achieve a finer integrity of soul by cultivating humility and contemplating their mortality in the presence of a species from the age of reptiles, and specimens standing tall since Jesus walked the shores of Galilee.

To the consternation of managers, giants continued to fall in Mariposa. The Stable Tree crashed to the forest floor in 1934, followed the next winter by the Michigan Tree and the Utah Tree. The second sequoia named after Mark Twain—supposedly the tallest in the Sierra—collapsed in 1943. After another study, the NPS eliminated camping from the grove, built a rock wall to buttress the Wawona Tunnel Tree, and spread limbs around its trunk to discourage people from walking on its roots. Tourists simply hauled the wood away.

The dual mission of the NPS—to preserve nature for people’s enjoyment—guaranteed contradictions. Rangers never stopped automobilists from driving through the Wawona; they encouraged it. This attraction brought endless positive attention to Yosemite, and the NPS hated to alienate its car-loving constituency.

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