Wellingtonia 133

A young Wellingtonia hard by the coach entrance to Kew Gardens, that is to say the Elizabeth Gate.

Notice the large bicycles taking up rather a lot of space on the cycle rack, presumably provided for cycles of more modest dimensions. Must be that sort of area.

Unusually, complete with cones. Maybe it is the time of year.

Google Images hedges his bets a bit with the image above, although Wellingtonias take it on a majority vote, but he is quite clear about the tree snipped out of the first image when I tell him to ignore the sign bottom left.

[Lake Fulmor, featuring a small grove of giant sequoia trees (top center). Ex Wikipedia, reference 2 below]

The cones look right at reference 2, but it does not say anything about the sex of the cones. Poking around, that these cones appear to be the females and can take years to mature and open as here. And reference 3 tells me that Wellingtonia are monoecious, with smaller male cones towards the top of the tree and larger female cones further down. They are wind pollinated but I don't yet know whether they are self-fertile. Wellingtonia reproduce primarily by seed, unlike coastal redwoods, which do suckers as well. Hortus Third not particularly helpful on this occasion and I don't really feel I have got this tied down yet.

Plus the Wellingtonia in the middle of the snap above might be fine trees, but they do not look much like the Wellingtonias you get here in the UK.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/10/wellingtonia-132.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoiadendron_giganteum.

Reference 3: https://treesandwoods.com/reproduction-in-sequoia-trees/.

Group search key: wgc.