General Sherman Tree
— two thousand winters in one trunk.
Not only on a wall.
“The largest living tree on earth, by volume, in the Giant Forest above the Kaweah River. Two thousand winters of cool fog and dry summer, all of it standing in one place. The bark alone is nearly two feet thick where the trail comes around the base. Up close the scale flattens. The camera can't hold it, and people set a hand on the rail and just look up. James Wolverton named the tree in 1879, for the general he had served under. The grove holds a silence most forests don't, because the canopy is too far up for any sound to come back.
General Sherman Tree, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The General Sherman Tree stands in the Giant Forest, a 1,880-acre grove of giant sequoias in California's Sequoia National Park, about 36 miles east of Visalia and roughly 6,900 feet up the western slope of the southern Sierra Nevada. The park is the second-oldest in the United States, set aside in 1890 specifically to protect these trees. Among the thousands of sequoias in the grove, General Sherman is the largest living single-stem tree on earth by volume, at about 52,500 cubic feet of wood. The half-mile Main Trail drops from the upper parking lot down to the base of the tree; the climb back is steep enough that the park keeps benches every few hundred feet.
Best current estimates put the tree's age at roughly 2,200 to 2,700 years. It would have been a sapling around the time of Augustus Caesar, already mature when the Magna Carta was signed, ancient when California was admitted to the Union in 1850. The trunk gains the equivalent of one ordinary 60-foot tree's worth of wood every year, a rate scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey have used to model how the largest sequoias grow more wood late in life than early. The naturalist James Wolverton named the tree in 1879, for William Tecumseh Sherman, the Union general he had served under during the Civil War. A major branch came down in 2006; the trunk did not notice.
The trailhead is signed off the Generals Highway, the spine road that climbs through Sequoia National Park from the Ash Mountain Entrance up into the Giant Forest. The main parking lot sits above the tree; the half-mile Main Trail descends through the grove to the base, and the climb back gains roughly 200 feet. A separate accessible trail leaves from the disabled-parking area near the Wolverton Road junction and approaches the tree on level ground. The Giant Forest stays open in every season, though the Generals Highway is plowed in sections only. Winter visits often require tire chains, and the upper roads can close in heavy snow. Rangers ask visitors to stay behind the wooden fence at the base; the surface roots are shallow and easily compacted.