why would bigboxstore have a redwood ..

i think we need to start with a proper ID ... unless you are 100% sure ...

can you post 2 pics ...one of the whole tree.. one closeup of a branch with needles ...

and what part of FL are you in ... the PNW is not hot.. most of FL is hot ...

ken

I don't know as to why... it's was on "Earth Day" and they were giving them away for free. Below are 3 pics I took this afternoon... the tag says it's a "Coast Redwood". I put the tree in a chair to use as a "size scale". As stated above, I live in Central Florida... "Lakeland" area to be more specific... between Orlando and Tampa.

Pretty little tree. Use it for a Bonsai, and it'll be easier to give it what it needs to stay alive in your climate.

I knew someone who tried Coast & Dawn redwoods as well as giant sequoias in Merritt Island (east of Orlando on the coast.) Seems like they grew well at first and then faded away.

Well, I had/have a feeling that it's just not meant to grow down here... So, if I keep it in a pot... explain the Bonsai method since I know nothing about it.

In a nutshell, Bonsai involves keeping a tree small with a combination of root pruning, crown pruning, defoliation, wire training and other techniques. The object is a small plant with the aspects of its full-grown nature.

Here's an example of a Coast Redwood on display at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens:

There are thousands of books on the subject and reams of free online information on the how-to aspects. Linked below is a good summary article at Wikipedia.

Here is a link that might be useful: Wikipedia on Bonsai

I work at Leu Gardens in Orlando. We planted out a Sequoia sempervirens 'Majestic Beauty' in Sept. 2000 and it grew well until this fall. It started to decline and was dead by spring. Don't know what happened. It was about 4ft tall when it was planted and was about 15ft when it died.

This spring I planted out a small S. sempervirens and a S. sempervirens 'Aptos Blue'. So far they are doing well.

Now Dawn Redwood, Metasequoia glyptostroboides, does well here as long as it gets moist/wet soil. We have several planted out along with specimens of several cultivars. The only problem I have noticed is that the variegated/spotted/golden cultivars lose their coloring after a couple years.

Sequoiadendron does not grow here at all.

I can imagine Coast Redwood doing alright in Florida since it seems to do well in the Central Valley of California if provided irrigation. It also does well in Georgia and South Carolina which also suggests that its reasonable to give it a try.

There are a few very, very large ones around north Florida and south GA - at least 30 meters tall and more than 50 years old. They need good moisture to do well - this is definitely true of Metasequoia.

I have a small grove 10 of coastal redwoods growing in Tallahassee Florida. I've been working on it for 25 years now, the largest tree is 40 feet tall with a base girth of 40 inches, second largest is 35 feet with base of 27 inches. The others vary and are from many planting attempts at different times. The most successful trees have happened when the tree actually rooted itself out of the container and I carefully cut away all of the container and buried the surrounding area in a mixture of 1/3 pete moss, 1/3 compost and 1/3 of the surrounding soil that is at a Ph of about 6.5. All previous attempts to fertilize my trees have either killed or weakened them. What works best is a thick laver of mulch (up to 12 inches). I use grass clippings, pine needles, cypress chips, pine chips and basically any green matter from my property that doesn't have any undesirable invasive species in it. The grove struggles every year through the heat of August and September but always recovers and thrives in December and January.

jimv, out of curiosity, I wonder if your best success with trees that root themselves out of the pots, indicates something about drainage and the water table in Florida ?

I don't think so. I'm over 100 ft. above sea level and my soil here, equidistant between Georgia and the gulf is labeled reddish brown , moist, medium to fine clayey sand from it's perk test. The test in that area showed 1 minute per inch. My well is 140 ft. deep at the second aquifer. I can't logically explain why the redwoods that root where I set the pots thrive while the ones that I "decide" to plant don't. I've decided (totally illogically) that redwoods want to "grove" instead of stand by themselves. I split the saplings from root bound containers and always have between ten and twenty young trees in 1 to 3 gallon containers. The ones that I have set around 10 to 12 ft from the largest trees will send roots out the drainage holes in their pots in a month or two while the ones I set in other places simply don't. After fighting with them for a number of years I decided to yield. It could be coincidence or the larger trees might be having some impact on the soil that the saplings are responding to. Regardless, after trying many plantings in different places that never thrived I decided to let them "grove" ! It did occur to me that you don't ever see a redwood tree standing alone, they're always in a grove. Having been around since before the dinosaurs, maybe they have some strategies we don't know about or can't measure.

Well if you live in Central Florida you are well within zone 9 and if you are in North Central Florida you are in the zone 8-9 transition area, (Red wood trees thrive in zones 7-9,) and if you got this sometime in the spring or winter, (probably the best time to get a redwood tree in Florida due to the cooler temperatures and fog,) it would definitely make sense for yours to thrive. I myself had a red wood tree that my mom got me for my birthday, but she left it in a box for a week, then put it in the wrong soil, and then we got a heat wave followed by flooding, which was then followed by Irma, which killed my tree. :/

The USDA zone ranges listed in various references - in the sense of designating the higher number as a "highest zone possible" - are often kind of meaningless, and especially so in the case of a plant like this. A large swath of its native range is actually zone 10...the immediate coast of central and northern California. Yet it would not survive long term in the "zone 10" of Miami Florida.

Likewise there are many maritime climate plants rated "zone 7-10" that would never survive a week of summer anywhere in Florida.

The better sources and nursery catalogs just list a single zone of likely hardiness or a minimum temperature a plant can be expected to withstand.

I live in central Florida, and there is a tree that TOWERS over the forest canopy on my daily route to and from work in Hernando County; so much so that I have been obsessing over it. I have tried to identify the tree by googling, and we have numerous Audubon books and have still yet to identify. I am going to take a picture as it it quite amazing; I could swear it's a Sequoia.

Be sure to start a seperate post

multiple pics will be best

100 ft. isn't "very, very tall" for coast redwood, of course - which grows more than triple that height in nature. But certainly respectable for any planted tree in an environment thousands of miles away from its native area.

Redwoods are native to an area with cool nights (even with the hottest summer temps) and abundant fog, from which they receive as much as 30% of their water.

I think the southernmost known redwood tree of any age is in Abbeville, SC. The northernmost (on the east coast as well!) is outside Philly.

Hey Jimv321.. how is your grove in FL doing? Still alive? I’m trying to plant my own grove in southeast TX

Mine is doing well in Panama City so far. Its barely a sapling, but its withstanding the heat just fine. The growth has slowed a bit, but should pick back up in October. I think the trick is to let them mature a bit before planting them. They are remarkably resilient trees after 5 or so years of age (more a size of tree and roots thing than time alive), but in their first few years they are quite sensitive and vulnerable. Best chances for survival will be waiting for the roots to fill a 10 gallon pot and about 5ft or so tall and planting in late September to mid October when the summer heat breaks-- first couple years might be best to put inside from mid june to mid october so the roots can mature. Then the roots have a good 9 months to expand into the ground to withstand the summer heat. I have seen these survive the summer heat in Fresno and Bakersfield in 2020 and 2021 where every day was 110+ for 2-3 months so I think they will be fine if you allow them to mature a bit before planting in the ground.

I had a small one that was growing well here in central florida. It died not do to climate conditions but because I wasnt home for a few weeks and invasive plants sprouted up all around it stealing its resources. It is for sure a species I will experiment with again, and when it was alive it somehow seemed to do better than a metasequoia I also had planted.

I don’t understand how they would hate salt since they are coastal trees that grow along the ocean

' I don’t understand how they would hate salt since they are coastal trees that grow along the ocean '

Great question!

At the time we visited the Redwood parks in NW California, we weren't exposed to the ocean at all and were probably ~3,000 ft. general elevation to even higher where the 'Coastal' Redwoods existed. Everything was an uphill climb from the parking lot (I was much younger then). I don't recall if we could even see the ocean through the woods but maybe we caught glimpses, way out there in the distance, I just don't remember. I do remember a calm, deep woods environment with towering trees so tall, I almost fell over backwards the first time I tried to look to the top.

My times spent in Florida have been quite different, with a mean elevation of the state between 5-12' above sea level and in the far northern parts of the panhandle you might make 100' elevation at times.

With general hurricane storm surges there rising above 12-13' and records showing even higher than that, the only rationale is that the entire state of Florida has been several feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean at one time or another, not counting the high wind and wave events that frequently occur there.

So, a greater chance of Saltwater flooding in Florida would be my Hypothesis. :^)

Florida barely has elevation which is kind of why it makes it so flood prone, but you could plant it slightly more upland

Sorry my friend ;-) Sequoia sempervirens doesn't tolerate soil salt very well at all.

'Although many redwood stands are close to the sea, they do not seem to tolerate ocean winds or salts and so do not grow on exposed hillsides that face the ocean. Redwood trees grow smaller in size and are replaced by other tree species as altitude, dryness, and slope increase.'

Source: https://ucanr.edu/forestry/Ecology/Coast_Redwood_Sequoia_sempervirens:

I wonder how one would do in pure muck soil where taxodium grow, if inland enough where saltwater flooding isn't a problem. Honestly if everybody in the state of Florida planted a coast redwood, a cultivar more capable of surviving these conditions probably would arise, the problem is logistics. Most people here are more interested in pushing true tropical plants, over even the likes of native plants, and for the few that like the look of the redwood, they are probably just content with bald cypress.

I think you should try it and see how they do. I've planted several in very different kinds of environments.... they all died but all from causes outside of soil type/heat: armadillos, floods, grounds crew weedeater, over-fertilized by HOA lawn crew....

I'd love to know how big they'd be by now.

Anyway - maybe they could adapt, like you're saying. never hurts to try

I think you'd have better luck with a Metasequoia in Central Florida than a Coast Red, and plants cannot just "adapt" to a radically different climate from their native one.

" I wonder how one would do in pure muck soil where taxodium grow, if inland enough where saltwater flooding isn't a problem."

Not well! It would last about a week in summer before the root rots would take it out! In the rest of the southeast where they do grow, they definitely only grow on well drained soils. I have had one die from root rot. In spite of being hexaploid, they are not invincible.

FWIW, there's a 'trick' about the PNW - coastal CA climate. I saw rhododendrons almost in the bottom of swales at the old Greer Gardens in Eugene, OR.* You would NEVER see them growing somewhere like that in PA, NJ, or MD. But...the time plants like rhodies and redwood are most susceptible to root rot organisms is in the summer. That's when most of those disease organisms grow best...at temps >= 15C. I see redwoods in the native environs growing in soil that appears year round damp, but guess what? It's only going to be inundated with water, during California's wet winters! Likewise with the rhodies that would experience wet (but not underwater, mind you) soil conditions at Greer...only in winter! There's just NO WAY for Eugene to have 3" of hot wet rain in late July, on a single day, as we can have! (or, now that I think about it, at Sonoma Horticultural Nursery, which is called something else these days, the same is true. Although Polo did put some rhodies on the lowest plains of his property in impromptu little raised beds. That might be necessary because he was so mild in winter, root rot organisms could still grow well during the wet season.)

Now that a nursery has supposedly grafted Sequoia onto Metasequoia, maybe people in the southeast can plant them in poorly drained soils with abandon. We'll see.

* - although, TBH, it wasn't much to see and not even as nice as the peak of NJ Rarefind around the time Hank died in 2009, I'm glad I got to see it in 2011 and meet the famous Mr. Greer. Greer might have had rarer, more tender cultivars in zone 8a, but Rarefind had just more plants, and better displayed, period, in their 6b garden.

"plants cannot just "adapt" to a radically different climate from their native one."

Radically no, but quite different, yes. That S. sempervirens have grown to large size roughly 100' ...anywhere in the east coast is a testament to just how amazingly adaptable they are. Yet they have, from Abbeville, SC, up to Philly...and over to east Texas. But always on well drained soil, btw. Being hexaploid probably helps.

Also, to say that coast redwoods need fog is slightly inaccurate. People in the more Mediterranean areas of California plant them as ornamental trees. There, the air is bone dry with no humidity. To say it needs fog is somewhat wrong. They do benefit from fog and humidity, but they don’t necessarily “need” it.

Yeah, most trees don't need perfect conditions to survive or even grow fairly well.

BUT...the better conditions a tree has to fit its preferences, the healthier the specimen will be, considering the same number of years old.