Redwoods
the world's biggest trees
Giant sequoias in the New Forest, Hampshire
Do you like rather vast European wood- and heathlands? If you do, then you should definately pay a visit to the New Forest, near the southwestern coast of England, near Southampton, Hampshire. There you can admire, amongst other things, the tallest giant redwood of England (51 m), but before we delve into that, first a few words about the New Forest.
The New Forest
This vast British National Park is one of the most natural areas in Western Europe and show how the forests, which are mostly gone now, would have looked like in medieval times, although it is not a real undisturbed natural forest like in the sense of the Polish woods of Białowieża (the only remaining European forest with no to very little interference of men). For more than a thousand years, these woodlands have been grazed extensively by horses, cattle, and deer, which has produced its own peculiar habitat.
There are 7,000 semi-wild animals running on the Forest, who are prohibited from leaving the area. They can run freely, just like that, in the woods, across the heath and the roads in the New Forest. The few villages in the Park are all fenced off (with the roads blocked off by cattle grids), so the animals cannot enter the little villages. But they are free to go everywhere else.
Deep in the ancient woods you can see a large diversity of plants and animals, and it's quite easy to image medieval wooden carts moving around the forest, Robin Hood style.
The images above show heather with flowering common gorse (Ulex europaeus), with a faint coconut smell hanging across these fields. This heather-covered heath is crossed by a lot of small rivers and boggy lowlands.
The Rhinefield Drive
In the middle of the New Forest, the Rhinefield Ornamental Drive can be visited. This rather peaceful road was the place where in the middle of the 19th century a number of then recently discovered North American conifers were planted. Most of them are douglas-firs (a few of them can be seen on the image on the right)
The rainy, southwestern part of England has a quite similar climate as the northwestern coast of the US (and southern Canada) and also the weather is comparable. This coastline is the natural range of giant conifer species as the douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), the coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), and the giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum). So the planted trees along the Rhinefield Drive are well on their way of reaching European record heights for these species. Only in Scotland they do a little bit better.
Multiple douglas-firs along the Rhinefield Drive reach about 50 m, coast redwoods of about 45 m can be seen, and, last but not least, a giant sequoia 51 m tall. It's the left one of the couple that can be seen on the image above. To get an impression of the height of these trees: the image on the right shows a detail of the image on the left. Do you notice the person standing at the base of the trunk?
This tree is the tallest giant sequoia of England and is still growing. For the people who like numbers: the measurements of this couple are 9.04 m x 51 m and 7.61 m x 47 m (girth at 1.5 m). In Scotland and Wales even taller ones can be seen, for example in Benmore Botanic Garden.
The Rhinefield Drive is well signposted. A few nice guys of the Forestry Commission have placed some interesting, light-hearted signs.
As far as I know of, this is the only place in Europe where coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) are reproducing themselves in a natural way: near the large specimens the ground is covered with seedlings. Most of them are douglas-fir, but some of them are also coast redwoods. Probably there are a few other places in the west of the UK where they do that.
The temptation to smuggle a few coast redwoods home from the Rhinefield Drive was too big for a redwood enthousiast as me, so I dug some out.
That evening most of them appeared to be douglas-fir, but well, some of them were the real thing: genuine coast redwood!
They are doing quite well now here in Belgium, and within a couple of years I'll get them out of their pot and plant them in the woods nearby, together with some giant sequoia I've been growing from seed collected from older Belgian giant redwoods..
After such a busy day there needs to be some resting, and how can you do that better than by lying against the soft bark of a giant redwood?
The Rhinefield Ornamental Drive, along the way from Lyndhurst to Christchurch, in the north connecting to the Bolderwood Arboretum Drive.