Avalon Emerson Sandrail Silhouette (2023)
“Go ask a sequoia,” read the lyrics of DJ-turned-indie-pop-artist Avalon Emerson’s “Sandrail Silhouette”. This one line perfectly encapsulates the song’s theme of wishing you had more time while it inevitably passes right in front of you: If anything anywhere knows what it’s like to have all the time in the world, it’ll be the sequoia tree.
These trees, native to the western slopes of the Californian Sierra Nevada, can reach an incredible age of around 3,000 years. Their long life means ample time to grow, making them not only some of the oldest but also most massive trees on planet earth: Sequoias grow up to almost 300 ft (90 m) in height, with a circumference of around 100 ft (30 m).
As sequoias only occur naturally in a very small area and have a hard time growing in the changing climate, there are only around 80,000 of them left, and many of the remaining groves are now a part of national parks. One of these parks, Sequoia & Kings, is also home to the oldest and tallest known specimen: The General Sherman tree is 275 ft (84 m) high and between 2,200-2,700 years old.
To illustrate just how mind-blowingly ancient that is, here’s some historically significant happenings in relation to its age:
- The General Sherman tree is roughly the same age as the earliest known fragments of Maya calendars.
- The development of the theoretical basis of algebra by Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi marks about the halfway point between the tree’s first years of existence and now.
- When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, this tree was already around 1,000 years old.
Oh, and here’s the song that inspired all this pondering:
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