sequoia seeds

For their support and friendship Rolly bequeathed them with something very precious, seeds from possibly the largest tree (by volume) in the world. You are not permitted to approach the largest Sequoia. It is fenced. It is surrounded by pavement and parking so humans can drive and walk right up to it without even having to get out of their cars. What do you expect from a culture so militarist as to have the gall to name something thousands of years old “General Sherman” (whose middle name was Tecumseh), after a figure in a war where they set upon each other, though there is a priceless element of irony to his full name. You cannot help but see the reflection of the culture its self in naming a living thing after a man of war noted as the originator of scorched earth atratagem in a civil war. Rolly was so roiled by all this, the lawn, the tourist fencing, and the fact that the parameters placed round it for sight-seeing (that obliviated its ability to reproduce without management), that he broached the restrictions by leaping the fence, grabbed a pine-cone and fled. From the cone he was able to get the seeds; he bequeathed the cone and seeds on the family as a gift for helping him by finding him a place to live, exhorting them to protect and plant the offspring. Of these four germinated; there may be existing survivors living in the Walbran Valley on Glad Lake 9 where the family came to live from 1992 to 1997.