Mention the name redwood and the trees which come to mind are the magnificent coast redwoods of the northern California coast. These trees commonly reach a height of well in excess of 100 meters (max. = 113 m), making them the tallest trees in the world! The trunks can reach a diameter of 6.8 m at breast-height. Western discovery of the trees dates from November of 1769 when the Spanish Portola Expedition, searching for an overland route to Monterey Bay, encountered a lone coast redwood with a twin trunk. While this tree was not tall by redwood standards, it was very impressive to the explorers, who called the tree palo colorado and named the locality Palo Alto. The tree, having lost one of its trunks in the 1860's, is still hanging on despite development and disturbance, and can be seen in a downtown park in Palo Alto, California.

Early efforts at description and nomenclature were somewhat contentious with respect to the two major kinds of California redwood, but the coast redwood was ultimately named Sequoia sempervirens by Stephan Endlicher (left). Endlicher (1804-1849) was an amateur linguist who named the genus in honor of a Cherokee Native American, Sequoya, who created a written syllabary for the Cherokee language.
 

The specific epithet, sempervirens, refers to the foliage, which is evergreen, in contrast to the deciduous needles of Taxodium.

Coast redwoods are native to a narrow coastal strip (never more than 40 miles in width) in California, extending from the general vicinity of Palo Alto in the south to almost the Oregon border in the north.

The trees are intolerant of hard frosts and cannot be grown outside of a greenhouse here in Michigan. They require abundant moisture throughout the year. The relatively dry summer climate in along the northern California coast is ameliorated by daily fog formation and the "redwood belt" is very precisely defined by the coastal fog distribution pattern.

Fossil species similar (but rarely identical) to the modern coast redwood are found in the early and late Tertiary of the American west. The plants were both widely distributed and locally common in the early and middle Tertiary of Europe, particularly in the German and eastern European brown coal (lignite) deposits.