A Redwood is a fractal. And as they put out limbs, the limbs burst into small trees, copies of the Redwood.

To us, when we look at a Redwood tree, it seems to be motionless and still, and yet Redwoods are constantly in motion, moving upward into space, articulating themselves and filling Redwood space over Redwood time, over thousands of years.

Like the redwood. Be big and powerful and strong .

This is the realm of the Coast Redwood tree. Its species name is Sequoia sempervirens.

You can see the range of the Coast Redwoods. It's here, in red.

I'm going to ask you to imagine what a Redwood really is as a living organism.

And maybe about here, about 30 feet, is the diameter of a big Redwood.

I climbed up a 130 foot, second growth Redwood called 'Artemis.'

Have you seen the picture of the sequoia redwood in California?

We're going to show you what the diameter at breast height of a big Redwood is.

And yet, when you look at the base of a Redwood tree, you're not seeing the organism.

We're looking at the very top of Gaya, which is thought to be the oldest Redwood.

The Eastern Hemlock tree has often been described as the Redwood of the East.

The Château de Barral (18th century) and its park has some beautiful specimen trees of (redwood and cedar).

And if we had Redwood like biology, we would have six layers of people on our hands, as it were.

The General Sherman is a giant sequoia ( Sequoiadendron giganteum ) tree located in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park in Tulare County, in the U.S. state of California.

There are two people climbing this tree, Gaya, which is thought to be one of the oldest Redwoods. There they are.

And with a friend of his, he took it upon himself to free climb a Redwood without ropes or any equipment to see what was up there.

The Redwood species seems to exist in another kind of time not human time, but what we might call Redwood time.

If a portion of a Redwood is rotting, the Redwood will send roots into its own form and draw nutrients out of itself as it falls apart.

If we had Redwood like biology, if we got a touch of gangrene in our arm then we could just, you know, extract the nutrients extract the nutrients and the moisture out of it until it fell off.

This three dimensional map of the crown structure of a Redwood named Iluvatar, made by Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine and their colleagues, gives you an idea.

He climbed up a small tree next to this giant Redwood, and then he leaped through space and grabbed a branch with his hands, and ended up hanging, like catching a bar of a trapeze.

In 1907, it was placed by Carl Ernst Otto Kuntze in the otherwise fossil genus Steinhauera , but doubt as to whether the giant sequoia is related to the fossil originally so named makes this name invalid.

Think about this tree, rising upward into Redwood space, 325 feet, 32 stories, an individual living organism articulating its forms upward into space over long periods of time.

The following year, Joseph Decaisne transferred it to the same genus as the coast redwood, naming it Sequoia gigantea , but again this name was invalid, having been applied earlier (in 1847, by Endlicher) to the coast redwood.

When Steve Sillett gets up into a big Redwood, he fires an arrow, which trails a fishing line, which gets over a branch in the tree, and then you ascend up a rope which has been dragged into the tree by the line.