John Muir's Sequoia: A Giant Tree Planted Far From Home, and the Effort to Clone It

John Muir at Muir Woods, date unknown. NPS (Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Park Archives, Muir Woods Collection)

John Muir was born on April 21, 1838. One hundred and thirty-two years later, on April 22, 1970, the first nationwide Earth Day demonstrations carried his cause forward. Muir had been alarmed by what development was doing to America's natural landscapes; the Earth Day organizers answered environmental damage worldwide.

Through his articles and advocacy, Muir pushed the idea of conservation toward the value of preservation — a radically new view of land use that called for action at every scale and laid the foundation of the modern environmental movement. After the first Earth Day, public demand for cleaner air, land and water led to the Environmental Protection Agency and spurred laws including:

Earth Day still feeds grassroots work each year: citizen science, community education, cleanups and tree planting.

"Big trees"

Loggers with a sequoia log. NPS (Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks Archives, Roberts Collection)

By 1876, as old-growth forests across the West were being logged, Muir was writing at length about giant sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) — his "big trees," which can grow 300 feet tall and live more than 3,000 years. He wrote of the species:

Barring accidents, it seems to be immortal. It is a curious fact that all the very old sequoias had lost their heads by lightning strokes. 'All things come to him who waits.' But of all living things, sequoia is perhaps the only one able to wait long enough to make sure of being struck by lightning.

So far as I am able to see at present only fire and the ax threaten the existence of these noblest of God's trees. In Nature's keeping they are safe, but through the agency of man destruction is making rapid progress, while in the work of protection only a good beginning has been made.

A sapling in a handkerchief

As the story goes, on one of his many trips to the Sierra Nevada, Muir wrapped a small giant sequoia in a damp handkerchief and carried it down from its mountain grove to his home in the low hills by the brackish Carquinez Strait, between San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta. Muir had settled in Martinez, on a farm owned by his father-in-law, Dr. John Strentzel.

Around 1885, Muir planted the sapling beside the main farm road, on a small triangle of land at a prominent intersection, and protected it with a wooden enclosure.

The Strentzel House, with the sapling's enclosure in the triangle at the intersection, around 1887. NPS (John Muir National Historic Site)

Dr. Strentzel, with the seedling's enclosure behind him, around 1885. NPS (John Muir National Historic Site)

With that piece of the mountains outside, Muir worked in a study in the house he called his "scribble den." There he wrote hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles and several books, which would help lay the foundation for the National Park Service (1916) and protect many remaining old-growth forests — including groves of his big trees.

Far from home

The giant sequoia's ancient ancestors once grew across the Northern Hemisphere, but changes in climate confined it to the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Muir noted that he had never seen a single straggler more than a mile outside the scattered groves. Muir's tree — more than 2,000 feet lower and 150 miles from its natural habitat — thrived for years after his death in 1914.

Children around Muir's giant sequoia at John Muir National Historic Site. NPS (John Muir National Historic Site / Keith Park)

Decline

A sequoia planted outside its range is vulnerable to stress. At the Muir site, the threats were:

• soil compaction over the roots from the surrounding roads
• a trunk flare increasingly buried by changes in ground level
• uneven soil moisture

In 2010, the tree was found to have cankers caused by the fungus Botryosphaeria dothidea, which helps kill healthy tissue in trees. Healthy trees can usually keep the fungus from becoming an infection; stressed trees, or trees on disturbed sites, often can't. The park limited foot traffic around the tree, aerated the soil over the roots and mulched the base to hold moisture — but the tree had likely been fighting the infection for many years.

Cloning Muir's tree

John Muir giant sequoia cuttings. NPS

To preserve the tree, the park's horticulturalist began trying to clone it in 2010, and later handed the job to the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, a nonprofit that propagates and archives old-growth trees. Clippings went to the archive in 2013, and a handful rooted. Whether the rooted cuttings will last — and how the new saplings will fare — still needs research. Logging no longer threatens giant sequoias, but the clones and their mountain relatives face new challenges in a changing environment.

Muir himself was confident the species would leave its mark:

Notwithstanding, I feel confident that if every sequoia in the Range were to die today, numerous monuments of their existence would remain, of so imperishable a nature as to be available for the student more than ten thousand years hence.

Learn more

• John Muir National Historic Site Cultural Landscape Inventory
• About giant sequoias

Sources

Based on "Preserving a 'Big Tree,'" National Park Service, John Muir National Historic Site, quoting John Muir's Our National Parks (1901) and The Yosemite (1912); a work of the United States government in the public domain. The article spells Dr. Strentzel's name "Strenzel" once; it is Strentzel, as in its captions.