The Redwoods of Santo Elias

Two coast redwoods stand in front of a hermitage, about ten metres apart, forty-five metres tall, and roughly eight thousand kilometres from the only place on earth they grow wild. Sequoia sempervirens is native to a strip of fog belt along the coast of northern California and southern Oregon, no more than about fifty kilometres wide, and it is the tallest tree species in the world. The reason it does well at Bucaco is the same reason it does well there: this hillside catches sea mist off the Atlantic, and a redwood drinks through its leaves, taking a substantial share of its water directly out of fog rather than up from the roots. The friars did not plant these. They arrived in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the forest had passed to the state and a fashion for collecting the world's conifers was at its peak, and they are among the earlier redwoods in Europe. Their trunks are about five and a half metres round, wrapped in bark that can grow a foot thick, soft and fibrous, fire resistant, and almost impossible to set alight. The two are near twins and the register separates them only by three centimetres of girth, so stand between them and you have seen both.