It’s almost summer in Iowa and the life on the sequoia farm is slowly waking up. To be clear, life beyond sequoias woke up a long time ago. The sequoias took a hard hit from the last winter. The winter was cold but not exceptionally so. There were a few cold spells with negative 20F, but the trees were protected from the direct wind, some very well protected, in fact, with a layer of fabric and packing plastic film wrapped around teepees made from rebar around the trees.
Here is the latest count of survivors and casualties. For simplicity sake, trees are classified as dead, alive and not dead yet (NDY). NDYs are those that lost most of the crown but have some new green shoots close to the base and in some cases, counterintuitively, on top of the trunk. There are a couple of these vertical poles with no live branches but with a small green bud on top. From my past experience with NDYs most of them die anyway but there were some exceptions. One such past exception was one of the oldest samples #220. It snapped back to life twice. Unfortunately, it is completely and irreversibly dead now.
Patch 1: 2 alive, 1 NDY, 3 dead
Patch 2: 1 alive, 2 NDY, 6 dead
Patch 3: 1 alive 2 NDY, 9 dead
Patch 4: 0 alive, 1 NDY, 2 dead
Besides aforementioned dead #220 located outside of main patches, there were 5 random sequoias around the farm. 4 NDY and 1 dead . This brings the total to 4 alive, 10 NDYs and 22 dead.
Even the ones that I call alive are struggling to produce any appreciable amount of new growth. Other conifers on the farm have lush deep green, powder blue and lemon green shoots between 6 and 12”. The place looks very lively, just not due to the sequoias.
It’s worth mentioning, that supposed cold hardy sequoias didn’t fare any better than the regular ones. No Exceptionally Blue sequoias survived. Over a dozen Hazel Smiths are dead.
Here is an example of the present day live sequoia:
Here’s an example of a not dead yet:
