The Giant Redwood of the Botanic Garden

In 1852, the Cornish plant collector William Lobb reached Calaveras Grove in California and became one of the first Europeans to see Giant Redwoods growing wild, trees already thousands of years old and taller than anything in Britain. Recognising what he had found, he cut his expedition short and raced seed back to England for the Veitch nursery in Exeter, which was selling seedlings within a year, an unusually fast turnaround for a tree nobody in Europe had grown before. Cambridge University Botanic Garden was among the very first customers, planting out its own seedlings around 1855. Two of that original planting still stand on opposite sides of the garden's Main Walk near the fountain, and a third, at the junction with Henslow Walk, has grown into the tallest tree in the entire garden at just over 30 metres. Redwoods take centuries to reach the scale they are famous for in California, so at under two hundred years old this specimen is, by the standards of its own species, still young, a fast-growing adolescent rather than anything close to the giants Lobb originally found.