The Coast Redwood of Artis

The tallest tree species on earth has a specimen standing beside a planetarium in central Amsterdam. Coast redwoods pass 110 metres in the fog belt of northern California, where they take a serious share of their water straight out of sea mist. This one grows about nine thousand kilometres from there, on drained peat, at a latitude California never reaches. Amsterdam's register of protected trees lists it as N5627, planted circa 1920, and the circa is the register's own hedge rather than ours. The trunk is 271 centimetres around. A century in, it is a juvenile: coast redwoods routinely run past a thousand years, and the oldest known are more than twice that. The bark gives the species away when the shape does not. It is thick, fibrous and reddish, soft enough to press a thumb into, and it is what lets the tree shrug off the fires that clear out everything else on a Californian forest floor. There is no fire here and no fog, only a Dutch zoo that started planting exotics in the nineteenth century and then kept them. It is evergreen, so no month shows it better than another. The Persian ironwood and the Heimanseik, the oldest tree in Amsterdam, are both a few minutes away on the same walk. Entry is an Artis ticket.