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Tilt your heads back, chins up in the air, let your eyes soar to meet the steeple point where the tree’s canopy pierces the sky. Towering above the nearby Taunus woods, FIS Primary School’s Sequoiadendron giganteum at a mighty 39 meters high and a youthful 150 years of life, will draw awe and magnetize all to no- tice. This is an extraordinary tree; it is called
a living fossil and can reach a mature age of 3,000 years. This gigantic sequoia is “our”
tree and as such offers us at FIS teachings.
To an international community that has to pick up and move, the giant sequoia gives us lessons in adaptation. Native to the Sierra Nevada in the Western United States, where giant sequoias grow in clustered groves on snow-covered mountains, seeds and seedlings arrived to the Taunus in the
1860s. Botanists and royals were keen to
see if the Mammutbaum would adapt to
the local environment. Forests needed replenishing and gardens embellishing. From the sequoias planted at this time, two beautiful ones are located in the Oberursel woods, another at the Schloss Kronberg, planted in 1896 by the Russian Czar as a remembrance gift to the German Kaiserin.
“Our magnificent sequoia was inherited from the previous owner of the property,” FIS
historian Clive Fenner explains, adding that the land was purchased for the building of the Primary School. Cynthia Fenner, FIS Primary School’s first Principal, recalls the general
FIS’s Magnificent
12 FIS World February 2016