The Sequoia of the Waterloo Monastery Park

The second of the three sequoias at Steyl, and the one standing in the monastery park itself. By the time this one was planted, between 1900 and 1910, the species had been in Europe for half a century and the novelty had worn off, which makes the choice more interesting rather than less. Somebody here wanted another one specifically, next to the catalpa, in a park that a religious community was still actively building. What a hundred and twenty years produces is a tree that has finished being a curiosity and started being infrastructure. A sequoia at this age is a fixed vertical in the landscape, visible from outside the grounds, and the sort of thing local people give directions by. It is also, in the strictest sense, only just beginning. Giant sequoias run past three thousand years and the largest ones alive were already old when Rome was founded. This tree is at about four percent of that. The cones are worth looking for on the ground. They are surprisingly small for the tree, about the size of a hen's egg, and they can stay closed and viable on the branch for twenty years, waiting for fire.