Sequoia: the Heralded Tree in American Art and Culture

Natural History, May, 2004 by Laurence A. Marschall

Just as Lebanon is famous for its cedars, so North America is known for its redwoods. Not only are they among the largest and most stately trees on earth, but they thrive in settings of surpassing scenic beauty. Strolling beneath a towering canopy of Sequoia sempervirens, the most common redwood along the northern coast of California, one experiences a world of subtle twilight just a few steps from the glare of a sunlit, rocky shoreline. The rarer Sequoiadendrom giganteum, whose ponderous trunks make their coastal cousins seem almost willowy, grow farther inland, in sheltered groves in Yosemite and other isolated valleys.

It is no wonder, then, that the giant sequoias have assumed symbolic importance far out of proportion to their restricted habitat. Lori Vermaas, a cultural historian, has written an insightful new survey of American art and literature on redwoods from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The most widespread early depictions of the giant trees, in the years during and just after the Civil War, were made by enterprising commercial artists who used twin lenses on their cameras to create so-called stereo view cards. Many of the pictures focused on the immense scale of the trees; a favorite subject was the Grizzly Giant, a tree in Yosemite National Park whose trunk soared straight skyward but whose upper branches seemed painfully gnarled, like the rheumatic joints of an old man.

To a nation still smarting from the horrible conflict between the states, the redwoods, far removed from the scene of battle, seemed serene, impassive, and impervious to harm. They epitomized the part of the nation that had remained intact and functional despite the fires of war and social turmoil. Huge paintings of sequoias by such landscape artists as Albert Bierstadt were all the rage (oversize landscape paintings being the functional equivalents of IMAX films).

Yet few envisioned the giant trees as symbols of an endangered environment. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, logging them was even seen as an example of humankind's ability to bend nature to its will. Woodsmen were "no puny impersonations of men" but men who swung "heavy, keen-edged axes as though they were mere trifles." Logging teams were typically photographed in the yawning notches of trees they were about to topple. In one particularly striking prim, an entire troop of U.S. cavalrymen, mounted on horseback, stand like conquering gladiators atop and along the length of the trunk of a fallen giant.

Exuberantly expansive, the American imagination invoked sequoias as a natural treasure, but a treasure to be expropriated and spent. Even John Muir, one of the nation's first conservationists, waxed enthusiastic over the use of redwood lumber in construction. Redwood housing was "almost absolutely unperishable."

The onslaught of logging operations, among other abuses of the era, sparked the modern environmental movement, and redwoods came to be seen as treasures to preserve. Although groves of redwoods are continually threatened, the trees still stand, and pictorialists in the tradition of Ansel Adams have continued to use the image of the redwood as an emblem of strength and endurance. Vermaas helps us understand the symbolism of sequoias, but even she must admit that the best way to appreciate them is on foot and close-up. "No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree," wrote John Steinbeck in 1962. "The feeling they produce is not transferable."

LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL, author of The Supernova Story, is the W.K.T. Sahm professor of physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.