Famous Trees of the National Parks: Redwoods, Bristlecones, Witness Trees and More

The needles and cones of a pinyon pine. (Photo: NPS)

Trees shade us, shelter wildlife, hold the ground together and feed people and animals. In the national parks some are the main attraction, the redwoods and sequoias, while others stand quietly beside a historic house or on a canyon rim. The National Park Service picked out its most famous trees; here they are, in alphabetical order, so you can choose your own favorite.

The giants

• Coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), Redwood National and State Parks. The tallest trees in the world, found only on the coast of northern California and southern Oregon, grow from a seed the size of a tomato seed to as much as 380 feet (115 m) tall and 22 feet (7 m) wide. Fire- and disease-resistant bark, interlocking roots and crowns that drink fog let them live for centuries or millennia, but not against axes and saws: logging has left old growth on just 5% of its original range, and the park service and its partners are growing the old growth of the future.
• Giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum), Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. The largest trees by volume, up to 36 feet across, 300 feet tall and 3,000 years old, grow naturally only on the middle western slopes of the southern Sierra Nevada. Sequoia National Park was founded to protect them.
• Western red cedar (Thuja plicata), North Cascades National Park, which with about 30 species of tree has one of the richest mixes of any park, from ponderosa pine on the dry side to whitebark pine at the tree line.

Coast redwoods. (Photo: NPS/Shaina Niehans)

A person dwarfed by giant sequoias. (Photo: NPS/Rebecca Paterson)

The survivors

• Great Basin bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva), Great Basin National Park. The oldest non-clonal species on Earth can live for thousands of years in three groves high on Wheeler Peak, Eagle Peak and Mount Washington, where cold, short summers and wind twist them into almost human shapes. They grow so slowly that some years they add no ring at all, and so high that rot, insects and fire mostly pass them by.
• Pinyon pine (Pinus edulis), Grand Canyon National Park. With water it reaches 45 feet; in dry country it stays a 10-foot shrub, and a tree that size may be 100 years old. Its taproot can go down 40 feet. Pinyon nuts remain a staple for the Tribes of the Grand Canyon, and the tree gives wood, fuel and pitch that serves as an antiseptic and waterproofs baskets.
• Utah juniper (Juniperus osteosperma), Arches National Park. In drought it cuts off water to a limb, letting it die to save the tree. Rising temperatures and shifting rainfall in the Southwest are now weakening pinyons and junipers.
• Northern white cedar (Thuja occidentalis), Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. On South Manitou Island, the Valley of the Giants holds cedars thought to be more than 500 years old. They may have survived the logging boom of the late 1800s partly because storms off Lake Michigan filled their bark with sand, which dulled the loggers' saws.
• Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa), Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument, in the middle of the world's largest ponderosa forest. When the volcano erupted about a thousand years ago it buried the forest in lava and cinders; lichens and mosses slowly made soil in the cracks, and some of today's pines may be the first to have grown back.
• Longleaf pine (Pinus palustris), Big Thicket National Preserve. Once the dominant tree of the southeastern coastal plain from Texas to Virginia, it now covers about 3% of its old range. It needs fire, and so does its habitat, home to the Louisiana pine snake, the red-cockaded woodpecker and the gopher tortoise; the preserve plants thousands of seedlings a year and burns under control.

A pinyon on the rim of the Grand Canyon. (Photo: NPS/Michael Quinn)

The "armored" bark of a northern white cedar. (Photo: NPS)

Ponderosa pines at Sunset Crater. (Photo: NPS/Rick Ruess)

Trees in history

• Black walnut (Juglans nigra), Adams National Historical Park. A "witness tree" planted by John Quincy Adams saw him prepare the defense of the Amistad captives, lose the presidency to Andrew Jackson in 1828 and win a seat in the House. In 1830 he reflected that a farmer plants trees whose fruit he will never see, and a statesman plants laws and institutions.
• Littleleaf linden (Tilia cordata), Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters. The 200-year-old linden on the east lawn, eighty-two feet tall, was loved by the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his family, who wrote about it in letters and poems; it is now held together with fill and cables, and a genetic copy stands ready to replace it.
• Sweet gum (Liquidambar styraciflua), Hamilton Grange National Memorial. In 1801 Alexander Hamilton had a country house built in Upper Manhattan on an estate of more than 30 acres with thirteen sweet gums. The house has been moved twice, in 1889 and 2008; the original trees are gone, and volunteers have planted new ones.
• Southern live oak (Quercus virginiana), Gulf Islands National Seashore. Up to 80 feet tall with branches spreading more than 120 feet, it has some of the heaviest, strongest wood in America; in 1828 the first national tree farm was established at what is now Naval Live Oaks to grow it for ships' hulls.
• Southern magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora), Natchez Trace Parkway, a symbol of the South and Mississippi's state tree, thriving in the loess soil left by the last ice age.
• Oregon white oak (Quercus garryana), Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. The open prairie there was kept by Indigenous peoples' burning; an oak feeds more than 200 wildlife species and can drop over 1,000 acorns a year.
• Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis), Sitka National Historical Park. Alaska's state tree lives up to 700 years; its light, strong wood built the Wright brothers' Flyer and pianos and guitars, its root bark makes watertight hats and baskets, and in the winter of 2021–22 Lingít carvers made a dugout canoe from a 25-foot log.

The black walnut witness tree at Adams National Historical Park. (Photo: NPS)

Hamilton Grange around 1889. (Photo: NPS)

A live oak. (Photo: NPS)

Moving a traditional dugout canoe carved from Sitka spruce. (Photo: NPS)

Trees in stone

• Agathoxylon, Dinosaur National Monument. About 150 million years ago, conifers 60–80 feet tall lined a great river where long-necked dinosaurs such as Camarasaurus, whose head reached 25 feet up, browsed on them; fossil wood even shows where beetles chewed it.
• Dawn redwood (Metasequoia), John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. Common along streams there 33 million years ago, it vanished from the region about 5 million years ago, was known only from fossils, and then, in 1941, turned up alive in central China: a "living fossil." It is Oregon's state fossil.

Fossil wood from Dinosaur National Monument. (Photo: NPS)

Sources

• National Park Service, "Battle of the Bark."