The second California redwood, the Sierra Redwood or Big Tree, inhabits isolated groves in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and was not discovered by westerners until the Gold Rush days of the mid-1800's. Initially Endlicher considered the tree to be a Sequoia and named it S. gigantea.

At this point, things begin to get complicated. The English botanist, John Lindley, came to the conclusion that the Sierra redwood populations represented a distinct genus, and he named the plant (1852) Wellingtonia gigantea, in honor of the Duke of Wellington, the British commander at Waterloo. This offended many American botanists (the War of 1812 was in the fairly-recent past at the time), and proposed that the plants be called Washingtonia gigantea. Things seemed to settle out when Jospeh Decaisne, a French botanist, moved the species back to the genus Sequoia in 1854. Most botanists accepted this change, although many British and American partisans continued to use their favorites, thus confusing things greatly!

This name was generally used until 1939 when Bucholz, at the University of Illinois, determined (largely based on embryological and chromosomal criteria) that the Sierra populations represented a different genus. Buchholz renamed the tree Sequoiadendron giganteum. Note that both of these photos carry over the older gigantea epithet, which is not proper usage. While Sequiadendron is now the most commonly used generic name, the British botanists generally cry foul! They point out that it was Lindley who first considered that the tree belonged in a different genus back in 1852 and that his Wellingtonia name has priority over Buchholz's Sequoiadendron. Just for the record, I think I side with the British here, but it is Buchholz's name you will encounter in most literature on these trees.

Sierra redwoods do not reach the height of the Coast Redwoods (max. = 95 m), but their trunks are much more massive (that is a full-sized cabin in the lower left of the picture above!), reaching diameters in excess of 12 meters! The plants also have a much wider ecological amplitude than their coastal relative and the trees grow well today where planted in parts of England and on the continent. There are two specimens of the species growing in the Beale Gardens on the MSU campus, on of which has reached 6 feet in height as of the Winter of 2001. The only Tertiary occurrences of the genus are in California and adjacent Nevada, so the plant appears never to have had a wide natural distribution.