Flame of life

Somebody somewhere must have written a self-help book based on the model of the sequoia, surely.

These magnificent, majestic trees live to be thousands of years old (the oldest living one reportedly 3,200) and hundreds of feet high, with roughly the mass of a jumbo jet. They don’t tend to grow in separate stands, but thrive amidst other conifers and deciduous trees and a range of wild flowers.

Cyclical forest fires can kill them, but are also essential to their survival and health: they clear away dead wood, making room for new growth, and the heat releases from their cones the seeds of a new generation. And many trees survive the fire, though sometimes it hollows out a vast area at their base. As long as there is living tissue still connecting root to leaf, the sequoia not only lives on, but heals: its shaggy red trunk is often spotted with dark marks like a giant has been stubbing out cigarettes there, and which appear to be the healed scars of earlier fires.

There’s a moral in there somewhere…