Coast to coast: Sequoia tree is latest West Coast native to put down roots in New York

New York is new home of sequoia tree from Oregon

NEW YORK — As such trees go it’s short and stocky — only 20 feet tall and 18 inches wide at the base, but come back in 200 years and it may be taller than most of the buildings on Manhattan’s upper west side.

It’s a giant sequoia tree, trucked all the way from Oregon by the city’s Parks Department, and put into the ground at Morningside Park on Tuesday.

The planting is tied to the city’s “MillionTreesNYC” program, an ambitiously self-explanatory effort to increase the number of trees in New York. “Now we have made this transplanted giant sequoia one in a million,” said Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe.

While it is the first example of the world’s biggest living thing on city-owned property, it is not the first giant sequoia in Gotham. There are two in the Bronx, at the New York Botanical Garden and the privately run Wave Hill Public Garden and Cultural Center, and another at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

Wave Hill spokeswoman Martha Gellens said the sequoia at that site overlooking the Hudson River was planted in the mid-1970s and is 45 feet tall.

The other two did not respond immediately to queries.

Sequoias are the world’s largest and hardiest trees, some having lived more than 3,000 years and reached 300 feet in height, equivalent to a 30-story building. They grow upward about two feet per year but the annual increase in circumference may add enough new wood to build a medium-size house.

Parks spokeswoman Jama Adams said the new specimen, which weighs 2½ tons, comes from a tree nursery in Milton-Freewater, Ore., that specializes in high quality shade trees, and a Stamford, Conn., tree care firm is donating its expertise to the planting.

Jennifer Greenfeld, the Parks Department’s director of street tree planting, said the Oregon sequoia becomes the centerpiece of a new pinetum, a collection of conifer varieties from around the world, in the 30-acre Morningside Park.

She said Frederick Law Olmsted, the 19th century architect also credited with creating Central Park and other outdoor spaces in New York, did not build a pinetum at Morningside Park. Nor did he install sequoia trees, possibly because he had no way to get them from the west coast.