#2: Tree Misinformation
An investigation of a mythical big tree statistic
Well, let’s hop to it. I’m sure you’re all on planes and trains and automobiles, so I won’t waste your time except to say that if you haven’t pre-ordered Must Love Trees: An Unconventional Guide, I would encourage you to do so. The advance copies should be going out soon to some folks and I gotta say, I’m a little nervous. But I left it all on the table. Little poker analogy for you, there.
A bid from me: try defusing your spicier relatives with a Jews Love Trees video on Instagram or Tiktok. Had a couple that I really liked this week about branch ramification and, well, me pretending to be a drunk writer who didn’t know that Henry David Thoreau was dead but tries to ingratiate himself nevertheless. Then you can push the book on them as well. Whether it’s genuine or whether you just want to put a $24 hole in their pocket out of spite, either is fine with me. But try your best to accomplish this.
Trees Past: Or, Why This Beloved Tree Fact is Probably Wrong
For a few years now, I’ve been preoccupied with the awesomeness of the Fitzroya tree (Fitzroya cupressoides), aka Patagonian Cypress, aka Alerce (Spanish for “larch”), aka Alerse, aka Lahual, aka Red Cypress. It’s a wonderful South American counterpoint to the North American glory of the Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens): similar bark, similar low-altitude wet habitats in Chile and Peru, similarly cypress-y in its foliage. And similarly massive: the Alerce Milenario, (pictured above, which had a major moment this summer after Gabriel Popkin published his piece in Science that spilled the tea on the emerging professional opinion that it’s likely the oldest tree on the planet) is about twelve feet across. Big tree—roughly on par with the biggest Douglas-firs of the Pacific northwest.
But it is said that, in the past, the Fitzroya attained an even greater size—a superlative size for single-stemmed trees. The current record holder for Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum, of which the largest grow wider than their temperate rainforest cousins the Coast Redwoods) in terms of diameter is about 29 feet for the stupidly famous General Grant in Sequoia National Park. We all know him. We all love him. Whatever. But diameter isn’t typically one of the most cited big tree statistics. Those would be height, circumference, and crown spread. So why am I talking about diameter? Well, because this stated fact is the capstone of the Fitzroya’s lauded “first paragraph” on Wikipedia:
Twelve-point-six meters. That’s 41.3 feet. That would be about twelve feet wider than the current record holder for Giant Sequoia. As I like to say, that’s nearly one megalodon long. A tree as wide as your house, presumably with one stem. And that image, my god. The very man, a mere 26 years-old, who would bring an end to humanity’s magical thinking on the nature of creation, setting science loose to discover the purpose of every prehensile rod of flesh and bone, whose work would spark the most revolutionary reorientation of human beings to the material universe since Copernicus dared to place us outside its center. This young man, bouldering wide-eyed against a great wall of wood, slipping on moss and humus as he tried to place his measuring thread along the base of the greatest living monolith of the primordial earth, now lost to the evil of greedy poachers and loggers. Surely this tree-like mountain must have planted a seed of anthropocentric doubt so rich that it grew within the breast of Charles Robert Darwin, rising again in his consciousness twenty-four years later as he sent On the Origin of Species to the publisher.
And how sad it is to imagine that splendid tree—enjoying its last vestiges of privacy from the world of men before it was felled shortly after, a harbinger of the wanton destruction of the rainforest, and a breathtaking analogue to the purposeless felling of countless Sequoias in the north that would occur later that century as they exploded apart on the ground into splinters—simply being. It makes us think of the Way the World Was. How nature’s creatures were once boundless and bold and reached a terrible and awesome size, whether megalodon or Apatosaurus or Fitzroya. How marvelous was their reign, and how privileged were the few to see their glory before they hacked them to bits so that the big thing go could go boom. I hope it was worth it. I hope they enjoyed pissing on wonder. I hope they loved the crash of 12.6 meters of trunk registering on the Richter scale. I hope they loved sucking the light from thousands of human eyes in the future, creating a million what-ifs, if-only-we’ds, and we-can-stills.
But here’s the thing: Darwin didn’t measure in meters. Darwin measured in imperial units, like every other scientist in Great Britain from 1826 on. So the mention of metric measurements seemed weird to me.
Here’s another thing: there’s no citation in the Wikipedia article for the measurement. That also seemed weird.
So I googled “fitzroya + 12.6” as one might do, to see what document this figure came from. It popped up everywhere, from Earth.com to iNaturalist to The Sunday Times, and even in a few academic papers. It had, it seemed, been accepted as fact. But none of these outlets cited a source for the statistic. So I presumed they were all getting it from Wikipedia. Even my go-to outlet, the Gymnosperm Database, which I relied on heavily throughout the writing of my book cited a 130 foot circumference (39.6m), which is just pi times 12.6 anyway. So where the hell did this measurement come from?
Now I want to be clear: no one really cares about this kind of thing except for me and other big tree enthusiasts. After all, the Sequoias are a mere 210 minute drive from where I currently sit. I could go see my favorite tree, Boole Tree, which has a comparable diameter to Grant, any day of the week. Well, not any day considering I had to plan my last trip six weeks in advance because of fatherhood and such, but you get the idea. Why not fall into its soft bark, forget the world, and shut the hell up for chrissakes?
Well, because as my responsibilities pile up in the world—one kid with another one on the way, house, marriage, ADT dudes tracking dirt on muh bed—and my freedoms to go forth unto mother nature are curtailed, I have begun to resent that people would portray the world I love— the natural world—in a way other than it is. Or was.
In short, imagination is what gets me off these days and I won’t abide someone incepting me with some tree BS.
So, as they say, “I got to archivin’”. Which is much easier than what I used to do in college, when it was fun to search for dusty old books in library stacks. These are no Records of Gondor—this is just the Darwin Online, a searchable database of every Darwin text and every Darwin adjacent-text ever written. Pretty groovy.
It took me about two minutes of searching variations of the terms “12.6” “41.3”, “Fitzroya,” “Alerce”, and “Alerse”, to realize that Darwin wrote a bit about the economic importance of Fitzroya trees—which were originally referred to as “Alerce” or “Alerse” before they were named for Robert FitzRoy, the captain of the Beagle, the vessel that took Darwin around the world—but he doesn’t comment further on them in his journals. His 1835 stay in Chile was the only time he was there—he wouldn’t have another chance to see them. But something that Darwin does say in an 1843 letter to his bestie, famed botanist J.D. Hooker who would later give the Fitzroya its original scientific name of Fitz-roya patagonica in the 1851 issue of the Journal of Horticultural Society of London (yes, I am a dangerous man), is this:
“I saw the Alerce on mountains of Chiloe (on the mainland it grows to an enormous size, and I always believed Alerce and Araucaria imbricata to be identical), but I am ashamed to say I absolutely forget all about its appearance…”
Now if you saw a tree that was 41 feet wide and you measured it, you would probably remember all about its appearance, no? Again, seems weird to me. He states that it grew to an enormous size, so that’s something. But no mention of measurements.
But how big was “enormous” to Darwin? Well, in that 1851 issue of the Journal of the Horticultural Society of London, of which I read several passages, a Messrs. Veitch is quoted as saying, having done primary exploration of the Fitzroya in its native Chile, the Fitzroya “grows to an enormous size, particularly about the snow line, where I have seen trees upwards of 100 feet high, and more than 8 feet in diameter.”
This limited understanding of “enormous,” which doesn’t even begin to approach the insane, twenty-to-thirty foot diameters of Redwoods and Sequoias let alone the mythic epicness of a 41-foot trunk, is understandable: the size of the Redwoods and Sequoias hadn’t yet entered the public consciousness in Great Britain in 1851, and botanists were more apt to see the upper limits of trunk size as an eight or nine foot Oak or Yew tree.
So, it seems, Darwin probably saw or heard of a tree that was around eight or possibly ten feet wide. But it was looking like a pretty hard “no” that ol’ Chuck ever took the measurement of the 12.6m diameter beast himself. The image of that starry-eyed natural selector vibing with the greatest of God’s creations was dead for me.
But that “12.6m” figure—did someone else take it and it just got attributed to Darwin? Couldn’t rule that out.
I started poopin’ around the subsequent history of the Fitzroya, and a couple of botanists mentioned the fact that Captain Robert FitzRoy of the Beagle, after whom the tree was named by J.D. Hooker in homage, kept decent records as well. After all, the tree was named after him by J.D. Maybe the three of them knew about this measurement due to its presence in FitzRoy’s journals? I don’t know, man!
But I went back to Darwin Online and searched for all the terms again, this time looking for them in relation to FitzRoy. And wouldn’t you know it, I saw this, in FitzRoy’s own hand, from Voyages of the Adventure and Beagle from 1839:
“The largest alerse tree that has been found by any Calbucano during the last forty years, measured thirty feet in girth, at five feet from the ground; and more than seventy-six feet to the first branches. This famous tree gave eight lengths of boards and half a length. The two largest trees seen by Mr. Douglas, in his excursion for me, measured one twenty-four, and the other twenty-two feet round, at five feet from the ground: but these were dead trees, hollow in the centre. He saw none above ten feet in circumference, that were quite sound. Report, however, says, that in the Cordillera, out of reach of the Calbuco woodsmen, there are enormous trees, from thirty to forty feet in girth, and from eighty to ninety feet in height to the first branches, above which the heads of those giant trees are said to rise some forty or fifty feet.”
OK. Now if Darwin had seen a tree that was 41 feet in diameter, I’m pretty sure that FitzRoy would have mentioned it here, since the dude clearly loves the phrase “Report, however”. So we can be doubly sure that Darwin did not measure a psychotically huge tree. And the largest trees that FitzRoy has heard “report” about? Forty feet in girth, or about twelve feet (4m) in diameter. Bummer.
Furthermore, take a look at the phraseology in this line: “The two largest trees seen by Mr. Douglas, in his excursion for me, measured one twenty-four, and the other twenty-two feet round, at five feet from the ground…”
The meaning of that line in context is: “one of these trees measured twenty-four feet, and the other tree measured twenty-two feet.” But if I was an undiscerning reader, I might look at that like this: “The two largest trees seen by Mr. Douglas, in his excursion for me, measured 124, and the other 122 feet round, at five feet from the ground…”
124 feet. And, by extension, 122 feet. Just short of 130 feet. Which is 39.6m. Which is 12.6m times pi.
Picture it: someone is zipping through primary source material, misreads a statistic, gets excited, jumbles the captain with the famous passenger, and his assertion winds up copied and pasted all throughout botanical history, then throughout the internet, where it is made permanent, and thus a narrative of the Alerce’s former, mythic glory is born.
I checked in with Christopher Earle, who runs the Gymnosperm Database, about my theory. He said it’s plausible. But we don’t have access to the original cited sources anymore, so we can’t be sure.
Now I don’t want to mince words about the true history of the Fitzroya. It’s tragic. Even more-so than the Coast Redwood, which has been logged to 5% of its original population. The Fitzroya has been used a weapon of war between brutal colonists and indigenous peoples, each one setting the forest aflame to isolate, drive back, or destroy the other side. The Fitzroya’s lumber, historically prized and sometimes even used as currency for its high quality, was only protected by the Chilean government in 1976 but poaching continues to this day.
The Fitzroya is a tree of conquest, war, and apparently, unimaginable beauty. It is deserving of a myth of greatness, which is partially why I feel bad writing this.
But I also feel bad because I think we’re all excited to imagine a world before modernity destroyed it, and it’s wonderful to dream that everything was enormous, like how we could be if we stopped destroying ourselves.
The Alerce Milenario, which I mentioned at the beginning of this article, is likely as big as, or bigger than, any of the trees that Darwin or FitzRoy saw or reported or heard report of at more than twelve feet in diameter. So in some ways the Fitzroya is as small as it ever was.
But it’s also true that the Alerce Milenario proves the Fitzroya is still as big as it ever was. It’s a two-hundred foot sea monster, shivering on the lips of gob-smacked sailors, growing larger and more terrifying in their memory. I hope to see it some day with clear eyes. The Milenario is the best of its name, has always been the best of its name, and it’s still out there.
Trees Present
I did a video this week on ramification, which consequential branching. I tried to understand it in context of its other uses, and in my current life.
Trees Future
I’m wrapping up marathon training, and I’ll be running in Sacramento in the California International Marathon next Sunday the 4th. I’m excited to see the trees along the route. They’ll be great points of concentration once everything starts to melt into oblivion and I begin questioning my sanity at mile 21.
An Out-of-Context Sentence from Must Love Trees: An Unconventional Guide
Page 55:
“I guarantee you that the combination of a cone that withstands an intense grip during heated discussion and a Scotch that pulls no punches in complexity will make for a lively exchange.”
Pre-order from:
Things I’m reading and thinking about:
-This hilarious piece by my friend Eli Grober that was in the New Yorker this week:
-How shameless the male camp counselors were when they played Dashboard Confessional songs around the campfire and made eye contact with the female counselors in 2003. Had I been able to play guitar, I would have done the same.
-How I will hire a part-time intern this spring to help with book release, event organization, and some other stuff, and how I have no idea how to hire someone and be an employer.
Happy Thanksgiving,
Tobin