Two yellow-helmeted tree climbers painstakingly hoisted themselves up ropes and climbed branches to reach the top of some old-growth redwood trees at a Marin County park near here called Roy's Redwoods. More than 200 feet above the ground they cut branches to be used to create hundreds of redwood clones.

In a couple of years, when the clones are two to three feet tall, they will be used, it is hoped, to create redwood forests in other parts of California and around the world.

Cloning has “never been done with the world's tallest organism,” said William J Libby, a professor emeritus of forests and genetics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a board member of the Save-the-Redwoods League. Libby has helped plant clone-seedling redwood forests in England, France, New Zealand and elsewhere since the early 1980s.

The word “cloning,” in this context, may be misleading, in that it is nothing as arcane or difficult as cloning mammals. It simply means growing a genetically identical plant. With redwoods, this is accomplished by dipping a cutting four to six inches long into a growth-hormone cocktail and then planting it in a temperature-and moisture-controlled fog chamber. Nine hundred cuttings have already been made, 300 of each of three trees sampled. It takes 20 cuttings that have grown into seedlings to reforest one acre.

Using the clones of the biggest and oldest trees themselves, however, gives reforestation efforts “reliability and control you don't have with seedlings,” Libby said, because the parents of a seedling are not known.

“A whole lot of things go into living longer, and no one can say these are better trees, although they likely are,” Libby said of the cloned redwoods. “But they are icons. I've seen foresters cry when they've stood at the feet of some of these trees.”

The hope is that the near-mythical nature of the trees being cloned will fuel interest in the creation of new redwood forests around the world. Libby is helping to find suitable trees to clone and suitable planting sites.

The project was organised by the Champion Tree Project International, a non-profit group from Michigan, that has helped clone many of the largest and oldest living trees, including Methuselah, a bristlecone pine in the White Mountains of eastern California. At more than 4,700 years old, it is believed to be the oldest tree in the world. The group has also cloned the champion white ash tree in Sparkill, NY. The project clones are planted in what David Milarch, a co-founder of the project, calls living “genetic libraries” around the country.

The plan is to create a collection of clones from at least 100 of the tallest and oldest redwood trees available for cloning and donate a set to whoever wants, and is able, to care for them. The Strybing Arboretum in San Francisco has agreed to take a set. The cloned trees will not be patented and will remain in the public domain.

At least one set of clones will be planted in a living archive somewhere in California, near a university. “We're archiving them so future scientists can come and study them and not have to go throughout the range and get individual permissions for each tree, which would keep a project from happening,” Libby said.

Only about 4 per cent of old-growth redwood forests remain. The trees at Roy's Redwoods Open Space Preserve near Mill Valley, named after two brothers who owned the land as a farm, are in the 250-foot-tall range. The Hyperion in Redwoods National Park, the tallest redwood, is 379.1 feet tall. The hardiest redwoods can live 2,000 years or more.

Steve Sillett, a biologist at Humboldt State University who climbs and studies the largest redwoods, has agreed to collect material for the project.

There are several reasons for creating new redwood forests, Libby said. One is to assure that there are populations besides the original one in California, should they become diseased or fall prey to climate change.

Redwoods can also play an important role in supplying timber, he said, because they grow fast. On an average, timber trees produce 3 to 4 cubic meters of wood per hectare while redwoods can produce 18 to 25 or more.
But it is not just about science or commerce. “They're also magical,” Libby said. “People feel different in redwood forests.”

One of the largest nonnative redwood forests is near Rotorua, New Zealand. Libby said there were also redwood forests in England, France, Chile, Scotland and Spain, and the search is on for other appropriate places to plant more. Redwoods can tolerate heat, but generally not temperatures below 20 degrees. They need lots of water, from rainfall or frequent fog.

Until now, the trees being planted have been from seedlings. In the 1980s, Libby worked on a project created by John Kuser, then an associate professor of forestry at Rutgers University.

He, Libby and others created clones of 180 seedlings taken from the forest in the early '80s and shipped the collection around the world to be planted. Others had planted earlier groves as well.

Redwood forests are particularly impressive in New Zealand, Libby said. The trees, planted by a lumber company in the early 1900s, are four to five feet in diameter, and native New Zealand ferns, which grow in the under story, are 30 to 40 feet tall.

New York Times