Category Archives: Inspiration

Say Hello to “Rocky”

This little guy is a Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens).  He’s about 6 months old, and a whole five-and-a-half inches tall!

He has the potential to live for more than 2,000 years, and grow to over 350 feet tall.  

Sequoia sempervirens are the tallest tree in the world.  (The tallest known tree, called Hyperion, is 379.7 feet tall.)  These magnificent trees grow only in a narrow band in Northern California and Southern Oregon.  

There are two other species of redwood:  

  • Giant Sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) – these are the most massive, though not the tallest trees in the world 
  • Dawn Redwoods (Metasequoia glyptostrobides) – a much smaller species, native to China, and often used in landscaping

Coast redwoods are conifers…  they sprout from seed contained in cones.  A seedling may grow more than a foot in its first year.  

Learn more about the redwoods!

About the Name

Rocky is short for Rockefeller.

John D. Rockefeller was one of the founders of the Save The Redwoods League, in 1917.

In 1931, he helped to purchase 9,000 acres of old-growth redwood forest from the Pacific Lumber Company, and donated it to the Humboldt Redwoods State Park.  The “Rockefeller Forest” is the largest continuous stand of old-growth coastal redwoods in the world.

He, his son, and his grandson continued to make generous contributions to preserve  the redwoods throughout their lives.

We plan on watching this seedling grow for many years…  when it outgrows its pot, we’ll transplant it into a permanent home.  

Inspiration

redwood-inspirationThe redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It’s not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.

John Steinbeck

Redwood time moves at a more stately pace than human time. To us, when we look at a redwood tree, it seems to be motionless and still, and yet redwoods are constantly in motion, moving upward into space, articulating themselves and filling redwood space over redwood time, over thousands of years.

Richard Preston

The greatest wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The redwood is the glory of the Coast Range. It extends along the western slope, in a nearly continuous belt about ten miles wide, from beyond the Oregon boundary to the south of Santa Cruz, a distance of nearly four hundred miles, and in massive, sustained grandeur and closeness of growth surpasses all the other timber woods of the world.

John Muir

A grove of giant redwood or sequoias should be kept just as we keep a great and beautiful cathedral.

Theodore Roosevelt

A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky,
Voice of a mighty dying tree in the Redwood forest dense….
The wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years, to join the refrain;
But in my soul I plainly heard.
Murmuring out of its myriad leaves,
Down from its lofty top, rising two hundred feet high,
Out of its stalwart trunk and limbs—out of its foot-thick bark,
That chant of the seasons and time—chant, not of the past only, but of the future…

Walt Whitman