Alex James

Slow Life | 23 August 2008

Putting down roots

issue 23 August 2008

The giant sequoia is the largest living thing on the planet: a tree. There’s quite a well-known photo of one with a road going through the middle. They’re indigenous to North West America but, far from uncommon in this country, great avenues of them are lining drives of stately homes like moon rockets, skewing the scale of everything; odd specimens in parkland dwarfing the ancient oaks. I reckon I’ve got the tallest one in Oxfordshire. Mr Taplin said it was the tallest tree in Oxford when he sold me the farm, but he may have been mistaken. For starters, it’s clearly not in Oxford — Oxford is 20 miles away — but it is definitely tall, visible for miles around, straight and narrow as an arrow but leaning gently to one side, setting the tone for the place where I choose to spend my days: one can’t be precious living in the shadow of a vast, beautiful but lopsided tree.

My father took great delight in measuring it with his sextant for a Christmas Day sweepstake three years ago and it was 137 feet tall then, as tall as a cathedral.

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