Though these young Redwoods are not at all close to being the largest, this fantastic photo helps viewers experience the awe of what it’s really like to experience this. The little girl looking up with arms over her heart makes it. [The heart is more than a pump].
For maximum experience, click on this image to see the large, detailed one, and click the full-screen arrows. The image opens to wider than a 21.5″ iMac when the browser is fully expanded.
Surprisingly, these Redwoods are in Australia, as the story below explains.
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California dreaming: the redwoods of the Otway Ranges
This isn’t the coast of northern California. It is the Otway Ranges in western Victoria, thousands of kilometres from the redwoods’ natural home.
Hidden down an old unsealed logging road near Beech Forest, not a lot is known about the Aire Valley redwoods.
Planted as a softwood logging experiment in the 1930s, their initial growth was slow but eventually, they started to shoot upwards at a rapid rate. The trees were never cut down and have now grown to a height of about 60 metres [197 feet].
Forestry expert Roger Smith, who has written a book on the Otways redwoods, thinks they could grow to almost twice that height in the next 70 years.
That would make them some of the tallest trees in the world. “Hyperion”, a redwood in northern California, holds the title of the tallest tree in the world at 115 metres [377 feet].
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Jane Kelynack
Amongst Giants
Giant Californian Redwood forest in the Otways. So small and so big.
