Sequoias are actual trees, with an acquired mythical status from their enormous size, resistance to fire and other scourges, and their most impressive antiquity, measured in millennia rather than in years or even centuries. Hence, my shock at my first encounter of their cultivated variant, the weeping sequoia: a cultivar with the above-mentioned formal name.
Where can one see such trees, what do they look like, how did they come into existence ? In my case, I first saw one in Evian, France, on the shore of Lake Leman. It was planted along a lakeshore walk together with a variety of trees from diverse geographic origins.
Not knowing at first what kind of tree it was, I was dumbfounded to discover from the information card pinned to its trunk, not only that it was a sequoia, but that it was the giant sequoia itself. Not that it looked very much like one of the majestic individuals one can admire, for instance, in the Mariposa Grove, near Wawona, at the edge of the Yosemite National Park.
Imagine, if you can, a weeping willow with sequoia branches ! A pathetic sight. A tree that bends over from its own weight. Abundantly- needled limbs that, contrary to their usual custom in the wild, hang straight down. Trunks though, of an appealing warm chocolate brown. It looks very much like a disorderly bunch of sweeping brooms that some giant left behind, without bothering to put them away. Indeed, it is a cultivated variety of the giant sequoia: a so-called cultivar.
The world’s agricultural food crops are almost exclusively cultivars, selected for commodity: they give good yields, are resistant to disease and provide us with abundant foodstuffs. But why on earth turn this monument, the giant sequoia, into a cultivar? For the same kind of reason that more or less symbiotic animals, horses and cows, wildcats and wolves, were domesticated and sometimes even turned into pets. So that mankind could enjoy their company and, surely as well, control and kill them, bring them down to size and feel superior.
How and when was it done? By dispensing with normal reproduction, from seed to tree that results in a unique individual, with its characteristic genome. Replacing it with cloning, from vegetative multiplication, in which cuXings develop roots, or are grafted.
The giant sequoia cultivar was first noticed in 1863, by the Frenchman François Lalande, a nurseryman from Nantes; while the nurseryman-horticulturist Louis Paillet from Chatenay-lès-Sceaux, south of Paris, was the first to market it in 1873. The sequoia cultivar is thus, like many agricultural plants, a genetically-modified organism.
How does it fare aesthetically? I have already registered my distaste. Once you have seen giant sequoias in their native habitat, the aXendant cultivar at least to me seems a poor caricature.
Many people will disagree, though. They will point to many an instance of cultivars having markedly improved the wild type, such as roses or tulips. The wild plants, however, are often much beXer at nectar production and thus at aXracting pollinators — which helps to explain their survival in competition with their hybrid cultivated cousins.
Which brings up a last but important point, the relationship of mankind to nature. To me at least, it ought to be marked by the utmost respect. If not upheld, it brings about destruction, reduction of biodiversity and loss — to mankind ultimately. End of sermon!