Forestry’s clone rangers want to resurrect giants
A CENTURY ago, loggers felled a colossal tree in northern California. Left behind was the ‘‘Fieldbrook Stump’’, a gargantuan nub of gnarled timber nearly 10m wide.
The tree itself, a coast redwood, might have been 3000 years old and was taller than Big Ben. If alive today it would probably surpass the General Sherman, the giant sequoia that is now the largest tree on Earth. One of the mightiest things ever to live, the Fieldbrook Redwood suffered an ignoble end: A British businessman is said to have turned a single slice into a dinner table to seat 40.
Now, however, a group of conservationists claims to have achieved what was thought impossible: They have brought this sleeping giant back to life.
As part of an unprecedented experiment, clones of the Fieldbrook Redwood were moved during the week to a forestry plot in Oregon. In all, 250 replicas of 18 different trees – many of them bigger when they lived than anything left standing today – were planted. Those behind the scheme have a simple but hugely ambitious aim: To recreate old-growth redwood forests around the world as a new weapon against climate change.
The Oregon project, they hope, will become a kind of arboreal Jurassic Park. They also believe it will serve as a Noah’s Ark – a living repository of ancient DNA.
Led by some of the world’s most prolific ‘‘big tree hunters’’, the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive has spent years collecting samples from dozens of America’s largest, oldest coast redwoods and giant sequoias.
It has also been at work in Ireland. Last year it collected 11 genotypes of ancient oaks from Charleville, Ireland’s oldest oak forest. Clones of those trees have already been planted in the Netherlands. Archangel believes that, by augmenting genetic diversity, such projects may help counter the effects of diseases killing British trees, such as sudden oak death and ash dieback.
David Milarch, the Archangel cofounder, argues that the process of deforestation in Britain, in effect, sent the process of natural selection into reverse. The strongest trees were felled first.
Diseases were handed an advantage because Britain’s best trees long ago became ships’ masts, or sideboards, or charcoal, he believes. ‘‘We’re left with the junk of the junk – trees that are more susceptible to pests,’’ Milarch said.
Archangel’s techniques will be familiar to any gardener who has grown a cutting. When the group find a suitably immense redwood they takes samples, sending climbers to the top of intact specimens to prune the growing tips, or collecting the sprouts that are still put out by stumps that have long lost their trees.
The samples are spliced on to the roots of stock saplings, or dipped in hormones and bedded in peat or agar – conventional practices that Archangel says it has refined through trials. ‘‘The textbooks say you can’t clone a tree that is more than 100 years old,’’ Bill Werner, one of the group’s propagators, said. As he spoke he held a sapling that Archangel says is a genetic replica of the Stagg tree, a giant sequoia thought to be 2500 years old.