This is my first visit to a Center Parks and I’ve been impressed with what is here, it’s very well organised and the staff are really friendly. One of the attractions I found advertised on the website are a clump of Redwood Trees. So yeasterday morning, after breakfast, we set off in search of the Redwoods.
This is a big site and there are lots of lodges to stay in of all shapes and sizes and the roads and walkways meander through a whole host of them. We found the sign for the Redwoods, and after a stop to ask for directions we found what we were looking for. My research told me that these trees had been planted in 1850’s by the then (I think) lord of the Longleat estate. A bit of a status symbol I think, but I’m glad he did as I got chance to walk around and look at these magnificent trees.
To say that they are bullet straight would be an understatmnent, usually trees have some form of bend or other in them, but not these. It’s hard to get an image of the whole of one tree given that they are so tall but this image was taken as low down as I could get, given there was a rail in the way. I understand why they have the rails in place this is to keep people on the boardwalks and away from the trees. Well to stop most people touching them. This image was taken on my Sony Alpha7 IV, at 24mm, f9, at 1/9th of a second at ISO 100. I’m quite pleased with the sharpness considering it was handheld at such a slow shutter speed.
From the image above to get a sense of the sheer scale both height and width (girth) of the trees themselves. There are lots of pine trees in the forests here but none of the sheer girth of these. To be fair these are small in comparison to the ones you can see in America, but nonetheless they are impressive enough for me.
The tress are planted in small groups, I’m not sure if there is any significance to the way they are planted but that’s what I noticed as we walked around them.
You can see in the image above the boardwalk that surrounds these trees. You can see that they must have been here a while as they are covered in moss and it was quite slippy but thankfully i didn’t end up on my backside.
These really are quite impressive trees, in a huge forest of lots of other trees. I’m not really a tree hugger at such but its remarkable that these trees and still standing as originally intended, and we (the human race) haven’t done anything to get in the way of them going from strength to strength. These are not quite woodland images, they are of trees i grant you but i wanted to capture them as they currently stand. Very impressive Mother Nature.