The tallest tree species on Earth has a foothold in a four-hectare university garden in Porto, and it's already one of the biggest specimens the city has.
Photo: duarte (CC BY)
Coast Redwood
Sequoia sempervirens
The tallest tree species on earth takes a serious share of its water straight out of sea mist, which is why it belongs to the fog belt of the northern Californian coast. We map 21 of them, in 17 cities.
There it gets very old: Colonel Armstrong, in the grove a lumberman set aside near Guerneville, is roughly 1,400 years old, and the Parson Jones Tree beside it runs past 94 metres. Europe hands it the rainless summer and none of the fog. So the redwood on Rome's Pincio has stopped at thirty metres, a good height for a Roman tree and a failure for this species, and has gone thick instead. Where the air stays damp the answer is different: Lucca's clears every tower inside the walls except the two you can climb. Most of Europe's went in within a few decades, because seed reached the continent in the 1840s and every ambitious garden wanted one.
Porto
Bath
The Great Dell is a disused stone quarry on the northern edge of Royal Victoria Park's Botanical Gardens, planted out in the Victorian era with conifers that had only just started arriving in Brita...
Lucca
The tallest living thing inside Lucca's walls is Californian.
Photo: Palickap (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Rome
Thirty metres is a good height for a tree in Rome and a failure for this species.
Granada
Coast redwoods reached Europe in 1843, and Granada planted some of the continent's first within little more than a decade, sequoias going into the Generalife's Upper Gardens between 1854 and 1856,...
Bologna
A coast redwood is a genuine oddity in an Italian city garden, and this one has grown into one of the tallest living things in Bologna: 37.4 metres, a trunk 520cm around, standing near the artifici...
Photo: Aneta Malinowska (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Trieste
The man who planted this tree was shot by a firing squad in Mexico eleven years later.
Miramare has two protected coast redwoods, and this is the one that loses the argument.
Salamanca
The University of Salamanca has been teaching since 1218, and the oldest living thing it owns arrived in 1870.
Cork
In its native range along the California and Oregon coast, Sequoia sempervirens is the tallest tree species on earth, and specimens there run past a hundred metres and two thousand years old.
Genoa
A Californian redwood 38 and a half metres tall grows in a valley north of Genoa, and it is not even the tallest tree in its own park.
Caserta
Redwoods do not usually reach four and a half metres of trunk this fast.
Bucaco
Bucaco's other redwood stop stands on a slope above what locals reckon the best spring water in the whole forest, the Fonte de Santa Teresa, named for the sixteenth century Carmelite reformer Teres...
Photo: Fundacao Mata do Bucaco
Bucaco's second redwood stands 70 metres from the Porta das Lapas, the forest's western gate, on the path down to the Lago Grande where the walled forest's own cork oak already grows.
Guerneville
This redwood is named after a lumberman, which sounds like an insult and is not.
Photo: Sergei Mutovkin (CC BY 2.0)
The tallest tree here is also the closest to the car park, about a hundred yards in on flat ground.
Palo Alto
Palo Alto is named for how tall this redwood used to be.
Bordeaux
Two coast redwoods stand about ten metres apart in a small garden on Bordeaux's right bank, one measuring 393 centimetres around and the other 390.
Monterey
This redwood has been around the Moon.
Portland
A coast redwood 114 feet tall stands beside the front door of a gymnasium.
The thickest coast redwood in Portland's heritage register does not stand in a park.
Explore by city: Porto · Bath · Lucca · Rome · Granada · Bologna · Trieste · Salamanca · Cork · Genoa · Caserta · Bucaco · Guerneville · Bordeaux · Monterey · Portland · every city · or browse all species.