Far from home
I was fascinated to read this news story. There are more California redwood trees (Sequoia sempervirens) living in Britain than in California.
I’d never really thought of them anywhere else. There’s a picture of me somewhere, during a visit to Yosemite, looking especially tiny - even for a small girl - next to one of the redwood giants.
But there are also 500,000 of their kin just treeing away, doing whatever they do, in the United Kingdom.
They arrived thanks to Victorian naturalists and gardeners, who liked to plant exotic trees. Of course they weren’t alone, in terms of species moved to new places - for good and bad reasons.
Sometimes people thought the introduction would be useful in that climate. That’s why there are Eucalyptus trees all over California and the Iberian peninsula (they are native to Australia).
Sometimes people just thought it was pretty and would make a nice addition: see those azaelia bushes in your garden.
Sometimes people thought something could be useful and it just got out of hand.
In the case of giant sequoias, they’re not the “getting out of hand” type. They’re not sprawling across the landscape like Japanese knotweed.
In fact, so quietly were they going about their business that nobody even realised til now there were half a million of them. But I guess if you live to be two thousand, you learn to take things slow.
What else I’ve been doing: I dropped into the Jimmy Malone show on IHeartRadio, which was great fun!
I also wrote for JSTOR Daily about Benjamin Franklin and the marbling of banknotes.