Sequoia giganteum, the specimens in Sawbridgeworth help to preserve these giants!
Written by Elizabeth Waugh
Published on December 1, 2025.
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Elizabeth Waugh in December writes of the ultimate Christmas tree, a conifer that has the potential to grow larger than any other tree on earth. Specimens of this tree grow widely in the Sawbridgeworth area.
The reputation of Rivers Nursery has since the 19th century been largely based on developments in growing varieties of fruit such as the Rivers Early Plum, a great commercial success in the mid-19th century, or Conference Pear, sold so widely today. However, Rivers sales catalogues issued at least once a year were tempting collections of many many fruit varieties and much else beside and sometimes ran to 60 pages. We hold a collection of these catalogues in the Sawbridgeworth Rivers Archive which have been donated or copied from libraries. These have also been put online at our website.
The catalogues, certainly as comprehensive and tempting as possible, included shrubs and trees. From Victorian times Rivers had Sequoia in their lists - for example we find in our catalogue of 1935-36 an entry for ‘Wellingtonia gigantea (California Redwood)’ in various sizes such as 3/4 ft for 10/6 described as making ‘fine specimens and lawn trees’. There are today around Sawbridgeworth examples of these great trees towering against the sky. In the town centre are three notable Wellingtonia, one near the old Vicarage in the Churchyard, and two more behind the present day Council offices. Whether these were sold to owners of the old Vicarage or Roselands as private estates or donated to these prominent areas is not known.
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| A Wellingtonia towers in the Sawbridgeworth Churchyard near the Old Vicarage. |
Was the mythic being of these ‘lawn trees’ fully appreciated as they were sold by Rivers and other nurseries and planted in the late 19th or early 20th centuries? That they may, all being well, grow for a thousand years and tower higher than any other trees on earth? That they in America stand proudly in groves to mark that continent’s early beginnings?
However, these trees are thriving here, growing ever more vast. Specimens were gathered in their native habitat of western California in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains by 19th c. English plant hunters. When bred on and sold, they were given the name Wellingtonia after the hero of the battle of Waterloo, despite American disapproval, who called their largest Sequoia General Sherman after a Civil War hero. Famous for their great age and huge height and girth, there are stories of doorways carved through them for cars to pass, or having their stumps turned into dance floors. Photographs and legends have put these groves on the tourist trail. However, recently with the climate warming and forest fires near, they are vulnerable, even their continued existence under threat. The British climate continues, by comparison, to be cool and damp, which provides the conditions in which Sequoia thrive. Although our Sawbridgeworth specimens probably are over one hundred years old and more, they are youngsters compared with the ancient Americans. However, their existence here in Sawbridgeworth for the time being helps the survival of these giants, even though unlike the collections at Kew for example, they were sold as part of trade stock rather than to preserve the species.
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| A view of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California where Sequoia giganteum were collected. |
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| General Sherman - its vast size is measured against admiring tourists. |
Here they tower in their great height and have the potential to grow on and on for successive generations of residents. Their green presence is not just as a fine lawn tree, as it was sold to be, but refers to how British plant collectors travelled the world and notably to North America to find exotic new stock. These trees also show how that plant trade may have nowadays, in an unforeseen warming world, made for a greater possibility of survival for this species.
See ‘Giant redwoods - the world’s largest trees- are flourishing in the UK’, BBC Science, March 13, 2024.
Catalogues and trade: these long catalogues, adventures in creating dreams for buyers as do online lists today, include so many names - how did managers meet demand?
Certainly though some stock was held on the Sawbridgeworth site, especially barerooted fruit trees, much wasn’t. We know that the present day Heritage Orchard contains so-called ‘Mother trees’, used for taking budwood to graft to the best root stock to propagate further trees of popular fruit varieties for sale. However, how actually did this plant supply business work including for exotics not cultivated on site?
In the Rivers Nursery book of 2009, recently reprinted and for sale, there is an interesting and informative article by Tony Slingsby. He was the last manager of Rivers Nursery, employed there from 1973, working with the last Thomas Rivers, and continuing until 1982, when the nursery fields were being sold. Not only does he fully describe propagation as it was carried out in the Nursery, he speaks of other ways to meet demand from customers.
Stock from specialist nurseries was brought in to meet demand for what was not propagated in the Nursery, such as Wellingtonia. However, some of the specialist trees once in stock could be reproduced by other methods than the traditional grafting. One such method was, as Slingsby describes, used to grow cobnuts and filberts by layering from mature trees. Another was ‘air-layering’ or ‘marcotting’ to grow stock from a mature Magnolia grandiflora. Here we learn of demand raised, and how supply was provided. (See ‘Propagation’, Tony Slingsby, in Rivers Nursery of Sawbridgeworth, The Art of Practical Pomology, Elizabeth Waugh, 2009.)
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