When Chris was researching Friday’s TGT on The Sequoia National Park and the largest tree in the world, he came across a story about the second largest Giant Redwood - The Mother of the Forest, and its fate deserved a TGT all on its own.

60 tonnes of its bark was stripped over three months and shipped to London to be rebuilt as a hollow tree in The Crystal Palace when it was moved to Penge Common after The Great Exhibition. This way the size of Giant Redwoods could be shown off in London, without having to wait 2000+ years for one to grow to its impressive size.

The hollow bark tree was destroyed a fire in 1866. The core of the tree, still standing in Sequoia National Park was destroyed in a forest fire 42 years later, which it may have survived had its protective bark still been in place.

Discuss whether this was an imaginative way to educate Europeans about the huge trees of the American West, or a terrible way to end the life of an organism more than 2500 years old.

-Bill