California is home to three exceptional trees and a couple of extreme shrubs. Trees are big and they live a long time. Shrubs generally aren’t so big, but they can live a long time too. The two largest species of trees and three very long lived plants (one tree, two shrubs) all call the Golden State home.
Starting with “big”, California has two species of redwood trees. One is the tallest and the other is the largest tree in the world. (There may be larger underground complexes of mushrooms.) The tall one is Sequoia sempervirens and lives in Northern California coastal forests. “Hyperion”, a coastal redwood, is over 380 feet tall. The large one is Sequoiadendron giganteum and lives in the High Sierra. “General Sherman”, the largest sequoia, is 35 feet in diameter at the ground, and the largest in volume. The coastal tree goes by “redwood”, and the inland tree “sequoia”, and the local parks are named that way.
Unlike most California residents, trees are dependent on local conditions for water. The inland sequoia get water from the high Sierra snow, and the coastal redwood from the fog that blankets the northern coast.
Further inland, yet, a smaller and older tree is also dependent on the local water conditions. The bristlecone pine (Pineaus longeva) thrives in places because if the scarcity of water. Found in Inyo County’s White Mountains (among a few other places) the pine lives on north-facing dolomite slopes, where it doesn’t have competition with other trees. These are some of the oldest living things in existence; a tree in the White Mountains is approaching 5000 years old.
Not so tied to local microclimates, there’s something even older. The creosote bush (Larrea Tridentata) with its yellow flowers is a common sight in the Great Basin deserts of the southwest. Creosote bushes reproduce by growing and splitting into separate plants. As this continues every 30 to 90 years, a single plant will slowly change into a ring-shaped colony of identical clones of the original. There is a ring of bushes in the Lucerne Valley with an estimated age of almost 12,000 years – it’s been alive since the last ice age.
Finally, and I’d never heard of this until reading up on the creosote, there’s the “Jurupa Oak”, a clonal colony of Palmer’s oak (Quercus palmeri) in Riverside County. Palmer’s oak is a shrub, although it can grow up into a small tree. It sometimes forms a clonal colony, and the colony in Jurupa has been estimated to be around 13,000 years old. An article states it’s the subject of discussion between local Native Americans, city government, and a developer that has its eye on the site.
I’ve seen both the redwood trees and the bristlecone pine many times. I knew of the creosote rings but wasn’t aware of the location of the “King Clone” until I wrote this. Normally, finding out about the creosote and the oaks close enough to me to visit them both in a day’s drive my wife and I would be on the road to see them this morning. But with the stay at home orders in effect, that will have to wait for another day. They’ve been around for thousands of years, and if the developer keeps its word to protect the oak, they’ll be there when we’re all free to go visit California again.