Childhood desires...

They say if you believe in your dreams strongly enough, they eventually come true. As far as my own dreams went as a child, I was a bit of an odd ball. Whilst most other boys marvelled at big trucks and fire engines and dreamed of becoming Formula 1 champions, I liked the natural world and wished for a galop with the giraffes in Africa or a picnic in amongst the Giant Redwoods of California. At that tender age, I didn't know where I would be able to experience these adventures, but I knew it was much further afield than mother and father had ever taken me and that I would even have to get there in an airplane - something I didn't even contemplate as a possibility. My dreams seemed very distant indeed and I could never have imagined that 20 years on in my life I would be eating my sandwich under the bows of wild Sequoias.

Last month I travelled to the west coast of America to see the delights of San Francisco, Monterey and the Wine valleys and among many of my anticipations was, or course, the one of seeing the mighty redwood forests. Before I go further I should perhaps mention that there are two different trees known as redwoods; the Coastal redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) and the Giant redwood or Wellingtonia (Sequoiadendron giganteum). They are both found in California, the first, as its name implies, along the coast from Southern Oregon down to Central California, the other some 4 hours drive inland from San Francisco, on the foothill of the the Sierra Nevada mountain range. They are closely related plants but quite distinct and easily identified. the Coastal redwood has flat green needles and a slender, somewhat scruffy silhouette whilst the wellingtonia has scaly blusish needles and a stout billowing appearance. Both hold a record for size - the wellingtonia for sheer bulk ('General Sherman' with an estimated size of 1489 cu. meters, making it the largest living single entity on the planet), and the coastal redwood for height (the 'Hyperion tree' at 115.55 meters (or 379.1 feet, a somewhat more impressive number!)). Both trees have a wood of excellent quality and most of their population has been decimated by humans in the early days of colonisation of California. The coastal redwood was worse hit, being closer to the ocean and more accessible to logging companies - less than 5 percent of the original old growth forest now remain and is found in protected areas such as the Big Basin Redwoods State Park in the Santa Cruz mountains near Saratoga where I had the great fortune to find myself only a couple of weeks ago.

The experience of walking in amongst the tallest trees in the world is a difficult one to share in writing, one can only say that it is a very humbling one! With so many gentle giants surrounding me, I felt really protected, peaceful. For a while I managed to forget about the crumbling state of the world and of the madness of my own modern life and really enjoy the moment for what it was; a dream come true.