Redwood

Wood Type

Sequoia sempervirens / Sequoiadendron giganteum

Redwood belongs to the family Cupressaceae, the cypress family. There are two species commonly called redwood, and they are related but distinct:

- Coast Redwood: Sequoia sempervirens, the tallest tree on earth
- Giant Sequoia:Sequoiadendron giganteum: the most massive tree on earth

For woodworking purposes, Coast Redwood is the relevant species. Giant Sequoia is protected and not commercially harvested. This post focuses primarily on Coast Redwood, with context on Giant Sequoia where the comparison adds meaning.

Coast Redwood is the tallest living thing on earth, and one of the most ancient. Its wood is lightweight, straight-grained, and naturally resistant to rot and insects. These qualities that made it one of the most harvested species on the West Coast for over a century, and one of the most fiercely protected in the decades since.

Janka Hardness

Coast Redwood: 450 lbf

Soft by hardwood standards, comparable to western red cedar and pine. Redwood's value is not its hardness but the combination of low weight, high durability, and remarkable dimensional stability. Old-growth redwood, with its tight ring spacing, is meaningfully denser and stronger than second-growth material.

What is Janka hardness?

Color

Redwood's color is its name. The heartwood is a deep, warm reddish-brown that ranges from lighter salmon tones in younger wood to near-mahogany richness in old-growth material. The sapwood is a pale cream that sits in stark contrast. Left outdoors unfinished, redwood weathers to a soft silver-gray, similar to western red cedar, but seal it and the reddish tones hold for decades.

Flexibility-Stability

Coast Redwood is exceptionally dimensionally stable. It shrinks and swells less than almost any other North American conifer, making it ideal for applications where movement is a problem like outdoor structures, large panels, and siding that needs to stay flat through seasons of rain and heat. It does not steam-bend well and is best used in straight, stable applications. Old-growth redwood is notably more stable than second-growth, owing to its tighter, more uniform grain structure.

Region

Coast Redwood grows in one of the narrowest ranges of any major timber species: a coastal fog belt running approximately 450 miles along the Pacific Coast, from the Oregon border south to Monterey County, California. It almost never grows more than 50 miles from the ocean. The fog is not incidental, redwood trees absorb moisture directly through their foliage, and the coastal fog belt provides the consistent humidity that allows them to reach their extraordinary size.

Giant Sequoia grows on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, in a series of isolated groves at elevations between 4,000 and 8,000 feet. Its range is entirely inland and does not overlap with Coast Redwood.

Tree Size

Coast Redwood is the tallest tree species on earth. The tallest known individual, named Hyperion, stands at 380 feet. Average mature trees reach 200–300 feet in height with trunk diameters of 6–12 feet. Individual trees can live over 2,000 years.

Giant Sequoia is the most massive organism on earth by volume. General Sherman, the largest known Giant Sequoia, contains an estimated 52,500 cubic feet of wood in a single trunk. It is not as tall as Coast Redwood but is far more massive.

Grain

Generally straight and even, with a coarse but consistent texture. Old-growth redwood shows dramatically tighter rings than second-growth, sometimes 50 or more per inch, producing a finer, more uniform surface. The grain is easy to read and work with, splitting cleanly along the length and sanding to a smooth finish without significant tearout. Figured grain, including burl and wavy patterns, occurs in some pieces and is highly prized.

Useability

Redwood works easily with both hand and power tools. It cuts cleanly, planes well, and sands to a smooth surface without much effort. Its softness means it dents and marks under hard use, making it better suited for surfaces that are admired than surfaces that are worked. It glues well and takes both clear finishes and stains reliably. Its primary strength is outdoor durability: the natural tannins in redwood heartwood make it highly resistant to rot, insects, and moisture, comparable to western red cedar and suitable for decades of outdoor exposure without chemical treatment.

The Tallest Living Thing

The location of the world's tallest tree is a secret. Hyperion, a Coast Redwood standing 380 feet tall in northern California, has its coordinates withheld from the public to protect the root zone from foot traffic. The tree is somewhere between 600 and 800 years old. It will almost certainly outlive the park service protecting it. That combination of size, age, and deliberate obscurity feels appropriate for a species that has been doing extraordinary things quietly for millennia.

95% Gone

Before European settlement, Coast Redwood forests covered approximately 2 million acres along the California coast. By the late 20th century, old-growth redwood had been reduced to roughly 5% of its original extent, one of the most dramatic logging impacts on any major forest type in North America. The conservation movement that formed around redwood protection in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was one of the first major environmental campaigns in American history, and it gave rise to organizations and precedents that shaped how the country thinks about forests.

Fire and Fog

Coast Redwood survives fire in ways most trees cannot. Its bark, up to a foot thick on old trees, is largely fire-resistant and contains almost no flammable resin. After a fire burns through a redwood grove, the trees often survive with little more than charring at the base. Some individuals carry the scars of multiple fires spanning centuries. Fire is not a threat to mature redwood in the way it is to pine or fir forests, it is part of the ecosystem's natural cycle.

Tannins and Time

Redwood heartwood is rich in tannins, the same class of compounds found in red wine and tea, which give it its characteristic color and its exceptional resistance to decay, fungi, and insects. These tannins are concentrated in the heartwood and are largely absent from the pale sapwood, which is why heartwood content matters so much in selecting redwood for outdoor applications. The tannins also mean that redwood can bleed color onto surfaces it contacts when wet, a practical consideration for any finishing or installation work.

Sequoia: Gentle Giants

The two redwood species represent two of only three living members of the subfamily Sequoioideae, the third being dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides), native to China and once thought extinct until a living population was discovered in 1944. Coast Redwood and Giant Sequoia diverged from a common ancestor millions of years ago and are more distantly related to each other than they appear. Both are relict species, survivors of a genus that was once distributed across the Northern Hemisphere and is now confined to narrow refugia.
Coast Redwood's range is among the most precisely defined of any major tree species. It exists almost entirely within the California coastal fog belt, dependent on summer fog for a significant portion of its moisture uptake. The trees absorb fog directly through their needles, a process called foliar uptake, which supplements rainfall during the dry California summer. Climate change poses a threat to this relationship: as fog frequency along the California coast decreases, the conditions that allowed redwood to reach its extraordinary scale are slowly shifting.
For roughly a century, from the 1850s through the mid-1900s, Coast Redwood was one of the most commercially important timber species in the American West. Its combination of size, workability, and natural durability made it ideal for construction lumber, railroad ties, water tanks, fencing, and outdoor structures of every kind. San Francisco was largely built from redwood after the 1906 earthquake. The species' commercial importance also drove the conservation movement that ultimately protected what remains of the old-growth forest.
Old-growth redwood forests are among the most carbon-dense ecosystems on earth. Individual trees store extraordinary amounts of carbon in their massive trunks, and the forest floor. The forest canopy supports unique communities of organisms found nowhere else: marbled murrelets nest in old-growth redwood canopies, specific species of salamander live only in the fog-drip zones beneath the trees, and the fallen logs of dead redwoods nurse entire successions of plant and fungal communities for centuries after the tree has died.
For the Indigenous peoples of the northern California coast, including the Yurok, Karuk, Tolowa, and Wiyot, Coast Redwood was a foundational material. Large dugout canoes were carved from single redwood logs. Plank houses were built from split redwood boards. The tree was not just a resource but a presence in the landscape that shaped how communities oriented themselves and moved through the world. In the broader American cultural imagination, redwood has come to represent something about scale, permanence, and the relationship between human time and geological time, a tree that was alive before the country existed and may well outlast it.