Wellingtonia under fire

[Performance: Uta Kögelsberger – Uncertain Subjects: Part II. 6 Oct 2018. Jubilee Square, Jubilee Street, Brighton]

Today's Guardian includes a piece about one Uta Kögelsberger who has snapped up a £25,000 art prize for making some videos about the felling of some giant sequoias - known in these pages as Wellingtonia - which had been fatally damaged by one of the recent wild fires in California.

To be fair, I believe that as well as being an artist, she is also a tree hugger and puts a lot of effort into trying to promote and preserve these trees.

In the course of collecting the references below, I learn first that sequoias are a bit tricky when it comes to reproduction. Second that the timber of a mature tree is not good for much, being so brittle that trees often break up on landing. But, until fairly recently, loggers used to log them anyway, with no respect for their size or age. Third and last, that giant sequoia only grow naturally in a small part of California, in groves on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, and a large fraction of that natural stock has been destroyed in recent years by the wrong sort of fire. An endangered species. Hopefully coastal redwoods are thicker on the ground.

PS: no idea what the words are doing in the second panel from the right, bottom row. A bug or a feature?

References

Reference 1: https://fire-complex.com/. The art.

Reference 2: https://utakogelsberger.uk/. The artist. Arty photographs and videos seem to be her thing. Preferably built into a a nice big installation.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQF_Complex. One of the fires.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagg_(tree). World tree No.5. A giant sequoia, naturally.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoiadendron_giganteum.

Reference 6: https://www.ancienttreearchive.org/. The people who clone ancient sequoias.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/06/wellingtonia-82.html. A  giant sequoia in a churchyard in Chippenham. These trees might grow quite well in our generally damp climate, but at at most a puny 150 years or so old, only a fraction of the volume of a mature Californian tree which might be 10 times that old.