This is the realm of the Coast Redwood tree.

The Eastern Hemlock tree has often been described as the Redwood of the East.

To us, when we look at a Redwood tree, it seems to be motionless and still, and yet Redwoods are constantly in motion, moving upward into space, articulating themselves and filling Redwood space over Redwood time, over thousands of years.

And yet, when you look at the base of a Redwood tree, you're not seeing the organism.

Think about this tree, rising upward into Redwood space, 325 feet, 32 stories, an individual living organism articulating its forms upward into space over long periods of time.

When Steve Sillett gets up into a big Redwood, he fires an arrow, which trails a fishing line, which gets over a branch in the tree, and then you ascend up a rope which has been dragged into the tree by the line.

The Redwood species seems to exist in another kind of time not human time, but what we might call Redwood time.

A Redwood is a fractal. And as they put out limbs, the limbs burst into small trees, copies of the Redwood.

Redwood rainforest is incredibly difficult to move through, and even today, individual trees are being discovered that have never been seen before, including, in the summer of 2006, Hyperion, the world's tallest tree.

Ants are not known to occur in Redwood trees, curiously enough, and we wondered whether this ant, this species of ant, was only endemic to that one tree, or possibly to that grove.

He climbed up a small tree next to this giant Redwood, and then he leaped through space and grabbed a branch with his hands, and ended up hanging, like catching a bar of a trapeze.

And that's what we're doing at the Redwood Neuroscience Institute.

They stop before a redwood trunk marked with historical dates.

If a portion of a Redwood is rotting, the Redwood will send roots into its own form and draw nutrients out of itself as it falls apart.

Redwood time moves at a more stately pace than human time.

Steve Sillett, when he was a 19 year old college student at Reed College, had heard that the Redwood forest canopy is considered to be a so called Redwood desert.

And maybe about here, about 30 feet, is the diameter of a big Redwood.

Down the coast here in California, the redwood forest grows to 40 stories tall.

Even so, about four percent of the primeval Redwood rainforest remains intact, wild and now protected entirely protected in a chain of small parks strung out like pearls along the north coast of California, including Redwood National Park.

But curiously, Redwood rainforests, the fragments that we have left, to this day remain under explored.

I'm going to ask you to imagine what a Redwood really is as a living organism.

We're going to show you what the diameter at breast height of a big Redwood is.

But then you enter the Redwood canopy, and it's like coming through a layer of clouds.

We're looking at the very top of Gaya, which is thought to be the oldest Redwood.

A tree. You'll look like a tree.

Tree

Tree

Tree

Tree

Tree

Tree

Tree.

Tree.

Tree.

Tree?

Tree.

That means a Christmas tree, a big Christmas tree.

at the Lote Tree (Sidrat tree) of the ending

at the Lote Tree (Sidrat tree) of the ending

Our tree. Tree kissing, a famous old Connecticut custom.

Tree Panel a tree view of the local file system

And if we had Redwood like biology, we would have six layers of people on our hands, as it were.

Tree View

DOM Tree

Tree Toolbar