The Coast Redwood of the English Garden

Redwoods do not usually reach four and a half metres of trunk this fast. On the fog-fed Pacific coast where Sequoia sempervirens is native, that girth marks a tree several centuries old; this one did it in about a hundred and fifty years, on the far side of the planet from northern California. The Campania forestry register does not date it by ring count. It reasons the age instead: past 4.69 metres around the trunk the species already clears the regional threshold for monumental status, and the tree went into the ground with the rest of the English Garden's plantings, so a century and a half follows from the garden's own history rather than a direct measurement. Twenty-six metres up, little about the tree reads as Mediterranean. The bark is the giveaway: deep, spongy, fissured red-brown, built to shrug off fire in a climate this garden has never had to test it against. Coast redwood is one of the tallest living things on the planet and one of the newer arrivals in this eighteenth-century garden, added long after the original 1786 layout that John Graefer designed for Queen Maria Carolina. It shares no relation with anything else on this list, which is exactly the point of a garden built to hold one of everything.