It seems ironic that the noble coastal redwood of California is named after the diminutive opossum. The reason is that sequoia in Cherokee means half-caste as well as opossum, and was used to describe George Gist (1770-1843), of British and German extraction. Gist’s mother was Cherokee and he was brought up as a full member of the tribe under the name Sequoia — “half-caste”.

The tree’s other name, sempervirens, means “always green”, as in Cupressus sempervirens, the pencil-shaped Italian cypress that is so typical of classical Tuscan gardens.

Sequoia became an important member of the tribe and devised a syllabary for the Cherokee language, allowing them to be one of the first literate tribes. The tree was named in his honour in 1847, having first been found by Archibald Menzies in 1796.Contrary to what you might expect, neither the man nor the tribe ever lived in the area where the redwoods thrive. And for all Sequoia’s much-praised nobility, the Cherokee tribe were great slave owners in the early 19th century.

Even individual specimens of coastal redwoods have been given suitably mighty names, such as the great “General Sherman”, which had a road made through its trunk. At 155m, “Hyperion” is the tallest, but not the oldest, which is reckoned to be well over 3,000 years. They grow in a narrow coastal strip from Monterey stretching up into Oregon, at altitudes where coastal mists protect them from the greatest heat.

It is worth sticking with the common name coastal redwood rather than giant redwood, because there is a related tree, Sequoiadendron giganteum, of equally massive stature. It was first named Wellingtonia after the 1st Duke of Wellington, then transferred for botanical reasons to the genus Sequoia, alongside the coastal redwood.

In 1939 it was placed in a new genus, Sequoiadendron, but the common name Wellingtonia sticks. In 1853, the first 21ft of bark from the base of a Wellingtonia was set upright like a tube and carpeted, with a piano and seats for 40 inside.

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