January 1, 2026
A Witness Tree is a tree that was present during a grand historical or cultural event of America. Witness trees are centuries old and are known to be of great importance to the U.S. nation’s history. It is unclear how many witness trees there are, but the ones documented are archived in the Library of Congress through the Witness Tree Protection Program, which was founded in 2006.
The program was initially created to document and identify two dozen historically significant trees in the Washington DC area. The creation of the program came from the discovery of Yoshino cherry trees from the year 1910.
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November 10, 2020
Hyperion [hahy-peer-ee-uhn] is a coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) in California that was measured at 380.1 ft, which ranks it as the world’s tallest known living tree. Hyperion was discovered August 25, 2006, by naturalists Chris Atkins and Michael Taylor.
The tree was found in a remote area of Redwood National and State Parks purchased in 1978. The Park also houses the second tallest tree Helios, and the third tallest Icarus. Sillett estimates Hyperion to be 600 years old while others report it to be roughly 700–800 years old. The exact location of Hyperion is kept secret to protect the tree from damage. Researchers stated that woodpecker damage at the top may have prevented the tree from growing taller.
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November 17, 2010
Luna, also called the ‘Stafford Giant,’ is a 600 to 1000-year-old redwood tree in Humboldt County, California, that activist Julia Butterfly Hill lived in for 738 days beginning in 1997. The name Luna was given to it in 1997 by a group of Earth First! members, who built a small platform from salvaged wood to serve as a tree-sit platform. Hill occupied the tree in order to save the grove from being clear-cut by the Pacific Lumber Company. Although many refer to the tree as ‘she,’ giant redwoods produce both male and female cones, and technically are neither male nor female, but monoecious.
In November of 2000, an unknown vandal used a chainsaw to cut halfway through the tree. Civil engineer Steve Salzman designed a system to help the tree withstand the extreme windstorms which frequent the Northern California hillside, at speeds which peak between 60 and 100 miles per hour. Tree climbers installed a steel cable ‘collar’ around Luna’s main trunk 100 feet above the ground. Four cables radiate from this collar and are attached with turnbuckles to four remote anchor points 100-150 feet away.
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