The Patton Road Sequoia

Forty-five metres of Californian giant sequoia is growing out of a street verge in the Southwest Hills, and nobody has written down when it was planted. Sequoiadendron giganteum belongs in the western Sierra Nevada, several hundred miles south of here, where it grows in scattered groves at altitude. Victorian and Edwardian planters shipped it all over the world, and this one took to Portland's rain well enough to reach 45.1 metres on a residential road. The register carries no planting date and none has surfaced anywhere else, so the age is simply unknown. The trunk says a great many decades. No source says more than that. The girth is unsettled too. The city register puts the circumference at 7.07 metres. An independent measurement, taken at a different height on the trunk, gives 6.74 metres. Some of that gap is probably just where the tape went round, but the two figures have never been reconciled, so treat it as somewhere close to seven metres and leave it there. The tree stands in the public verge at the entrance to a residence driveway. There is room to stand and look from the road, and that is where to do it: the verge is public, the driveway is not.