Well, it would be interesting to see if your experiment works out. From my own experience you can keep Sequoia seedlings in pots down to about 25F (like in a garage) over the winter, watering once every two to three weeks with ice water, though I'd recommend insulating the pots against the worst cold. In the ground they are a zone 6 tree. Zone 5 is really pushing your luck. I have not seen any problems with trees less than a year old surviving the winter due to cold, the main problem is that the soil freezes and snaps the roots away (freeze-thaw cycles). So I use ground leaf compost as the top 3" of soil for seedlings outside. It doesn't hold enough water to freeze completely solid. Still, I only expect 1 in 3 seedlings to survive their first winter outside. They do better in the shade outside in the winter too. One can put a sturdy cage around them and wrap with burlap if necessary.

They are very fragile seedlings, so you need to germinate many in order for a few to survive to the winter. I would not expect more than 1 in 4 to surive in pots over the summer. Water only weekly.

I've found that peat mixed with sand is bad. Not sure what regular top soil is in your case--mineral soil like clay-silt loam? Finely ground orchid potting mix is good, or ground leaf compost. Much better than peat in general. You can easily transplant them when they are very young (say a few weeks old) or after a year. They can survive in pots for about 3 years but they don't like plastic pots unless the plastic has a lot of air holes in the sides to allow air penetration. I generally use only clay pots or PVC tubes. Polyester fill in the bottom helps with drainage. If you cut the tubes length wise before putting any soil in and then taping them back together, it is easy to release the seedling when transplanting. Clay pots can be broken before transplanting if taking the seedling out looks difficult. Seedlings generally don't seem to like mulch and the acidity of the soil isn't going to be changed much by it. Not sure if a bag would make things any easier. Some bags are designed to decompose, but the problem is that they decompose in the pot well before you try to take the seedling out. Bagging is generally done when a larger tree, planted in the ground, is scooped out with a section of its roots in a ball shape. The burlap keeps the rootball intact until the tree is replanted, generally within a few weeks. The burlap is often removed along with any strings or wires used to hold it together. Smaller seedlings are almost always potted.

Best of luck.

Thanks a lot :)

Well, I'm in 5a; this is only its temporary home. My father's land is 5b/6a, and there's a lot of choices for site selection, so it could be easily sheltered from north winds. From what I've seen, it should be okay there if it's cared for well.

I ordered half a dozen more seedlings as backup this weekend; I know that they have low odds of survival, so it seemed a good choice. Still, I'd like to give this little one the best chance it can get ;) I moved the squash out this weekend, and isolated the little one's root system from the rest of the pot with foil to buy me some time in deciding what to do with it (I can remove the foil without messing with it's root system or move the seedling around inside it).

Thanks a lot for your suggestions. In short, you'd recommend going straight from a small pot or tube into the ground, rather than letting it grow in a larger pot for a while? And not to worry too much about how to get it out of the pot into the ground safely? My biggest thing is that, once it goes into the ground, I want it to have the highest chance of survival *at that stage*. If I lose 3/4ths of the seedlings before they reach the "planting" stage, that's fine. What I'd prefer to avoid, where possible, is to give my father a tree or two and then have it die after he helped put it in the ground.

Hi Karenei,

I understand the situation well. The sequoia will someday be protected against the Spruces. Your father may have success, he may not. The best bet in his case is for you to order a cultivar of this species called: Sequoiadendron giganteum 'Hazel Smith'. Buy him one that's at the very minimum in a one-gallon pot. I'd recommend for better luck for you to purchase one in a 3 or 5-gallon pot. A larger root-system in this particular case, will provide much stronger hardiness at this plant goes into its first winter.

What you currently are doing with seedlings could be worth-while, but honestly the seedlings are not as hardy as the cultivar. There are rare occurances such as this cultivar selection that simply have proven to show hardiness where all else has not proven to do so. Plus, you're dealing with much smaller plants and root systems and that will require him to grow the trees (or you obviously) in pots for sake of easiness then if it were directly planted to the landscape. Also, a one-year seedling in full sun without shade cloth protection or other means will probably not make it. Therefore back to my thought of keeping seedlings in pots which can be placed in filtered light or minimal direct sunlight should you wish to not choose using the cultivar.

If no success with 'Hazel Smith', I'd recommend he plants a Dawn Redwood. That's as close as he can come to owning one of the "true giants." (Metasequoia glyptostroboides)

DAX

Thanks :)

I've also considered, if we have no luck with sequoias, a Thuja plicata. More than the height, my father loves the great girth that sequoias have the potential to reach a thousand years down the road, and old-growth Thuja plicata are commonly 3 meters in diameter, with exceptional cases (like the Quinault Lake Red Cedar) up to 6 meters. I'd need to find the right cultivar, though, because I know a lot of the commercial ones are designed not to grow very big.

(?)

Good luck with your seedlings. I shall not comment about them any further at this point.

As per your girth request, stick with 'Hazel Smith' as she'll get girthy. Guess what, I have a photo of one from my trip to the Gotelli Collection in Washington D.C., a real nice and blurry one!

Professional photography at work here<:>

You can also take a look at Stanley and Sons website for cultivar descriptions. That is a quick reference, or, the American Conifer Society (website) will have information too.

May you find the trunk you desire! And note so it's easy for you or anyone that the spelling is "giganteum." To be picky, like a pain of a guy who constantly reminds you of the picky stuff! You may have already seen that.

Your seedlings will of course have grown to become massive trees in another zone or possibly you actually own that 1 per million/trillion 'hardy' one.

Zone 6b full time outta work out perfectly for a seed-grown Sequoia. The chances increase in an arboretum of named clones of course. But still, luck is the key.

Good luck,

Dax

OOC, any good suggestions on where to get a few Hazel Smith seedlings? I've googled, but all I find are catalogs with no prices listed or even whether the trees are in stock.

Call the American Conifer Society and ask what is being offered in their seed exchange program.

I've been on these forums for only 5-6-7 years now and have been collecting information all this time. Not once ever have I seen any offering of named cultivar seed on any websource.

What is "OOC" -

CU,

Dax

Out Of Curiosity. :)

Oh, and not seed -- seedlings (although seed would be fine, too). Small saplings would be fine as well; I'm just not looking for anything large, because I don't want to have to drive a long way to pick it up or pay an exorbitant shipping fee.

The point re seed/seedlings is of course that cultivars don't come true to name from seed . . . though they may become interesting specimens of Sequoiadendron giganteum

Resin

*nod*. Poor choice of terminology on my part. :) "Small saplings" would have sufficed.

By the way, an interesting thing I just ran into, re protection of the root system:

---
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/science/hartesveldt/chap6.htm

"Pavement which covers rather large portions of a tree's entire root system produces growth increases exceeding those mentioned earlier in compacted soils. Not only does impervious pavement eliminate plant competition, but surface evaporative losses are also reduced to a minimum leaving the "relict" sequoia a greater supply of soil moisture that enables growth to continue beyond the normal growing season. In effect, then, the growing season for such trees extends late into the fall and, in some cases, until freezing weather commences in December. One such specimen, the Sentinel Tree, situated between the Generals Highway and the Giant Forest Village parking lot, has about 75% of its root system covered with pavement, causing great concern until increment borings showed the tree growing nearly 50% faster than before the addition of pavement. Vigor of growth, however, may not be the final criterion of man's influence on such trees. The effects have been measured over a small percentage of the tree's total life, and these changes may eventually prove harmful."
---

In short, while the long term effects are unknown, pavement (driveways, roads, sidewalks, etc) can give a big boost to sequoia growth (at least in their natural habitat). I wonder if there's a good way to mimic this without actually paving over a large area. I would have thought that impervious pavement would deprive the roots of oxygen; guess not.

Looking for Hazel Smith- try River rock nursery or www.porterhowse.com.

I have had this question in my head for a long time.If you grew sequoias from seeds that came from the Calaveras groves,would that give the seedlings that slight extra winter hardiness?
I have been searching for seed from that source,but with no luck yet.

"f you grew sequoias from seeds that came from the Calaveras groves,would that give the seedlings that slight extra winter hardiness?"

Possibly, possibly not. The Calaveras groves are also lower altitude (1450-1500m) than the ones further south (1700-2250m), so they're probably about the same hardiness. The highest grove (2300-2450m) is the Deer Meadow Grove in Giant Sequoia National Monument.

Due to their being the first groves discovered and collected from, the vast majority (probably something like 95%+) of Sequoiadendron in Britain and Europe are Calaveras origin. Not sure if that also applies to specimens in the eastern US or not.

Resin

Also, there's a lot of variation between seeds, in general. Look at Hazel Smith itself -- just happened to be the right combination of genes for extra cold hardiness when all of its siblings died. :)

I think my solution for the winter is just going to be "bury them in snow, and bury them all the way"; I've recently read a number of people elsewhere recommend that. I'll probably also put the pots in a pit in my garden so that the soil doesn't go through freeze-thaw cycles as much. Ran into a tidbit (from the same source, quoted above) that one of the groves once had a recorded *29 feet* of snowfall. Several feet of accumulation is typical each winter in many groves (i.e., even second year seedlings often get totally buried). These are plants that are designed to survive being buried in snow, and it's really freeze/thaw and dehydration, not the cold itself, that kills them if they're exposed for a long winter (they can't uptake water from frozen ground, but they still lose it to the sun and winds when exposed). Which would explain why they tend to survive in even cold areas that get lake effect snow, and how one survived temperatures down to -37C in Poland.

If we run out of snow to pile on, I'll take the recommendation I found at one place -- thaw them, water them, let them uptake, then rebury them for the rest of winter once the snows are back. Hmm, shading the snow would make it last longer. I'll probably do that, too.

Ok. Revisiting this thread.

How have people been doing?

Other than Resin, who doesn't seem as active, I don't think these posters are around anymore.
People come and go on gardenweb. I had another ID in the past but I've posted or lurked since - I dunno - 1997 or so? Very few people have been around that long, and to be honest, I can't even remember what my ID was. I certainly met some interesting people back then, though. There was a woman in Fredericksburg, VA growing a lot of unusual plants for the time. She had a Genista aetnensis, as I had since the early 1990s. I googled her a while ago when her name popped up in an old email. She lives in Florida now.

This post was edited by davidrt28 on Tue, Dec 23, 14 at 5:05