sequoia

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. See redwood.
2. n. Giant sequoia.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. A genus of coniferous trees, of the tribe Abietineæ and subtribe Taxodinæ. It is characterized by an oval cone, with persistent woody scales each bearing about five ovules, and dilated upward in fruit into a rhomboidal wrinkled and flattened slightly prickle-tip-ped apex. The flowers are monœcious, terminal or axillary on young shoots, with their scales spirally set. The small and involucrate staminate flower consists of an oblong column of united stamens, bearing crowded ovate connective scales, each with three to five anthers. The compressed seed bears a thick spongy margin, and contains four to six seed-leaves. There are but two species, both Californian, and ranking among the most remarkable of trees, growing straight, tall, and columnar, with short densely spreading branches, soft red wood, and very thick fibrous and spongy bark. They bear acute, compressed, and keeled decurrent narrow leaves, which are alternate and spirally inserted, or spread in two ranks on the younger branches. Their small cones ripen in the second year. For S. sempervirens, discovered by Menzies about 1794, see redwood. The other species, S. gigantea, by some formerly separated as a genus, Washingtonia (Winslow, 1854), and the Wellingtonia of English gardens, is the mammoth tree or big tree of California. It is a less graceful tree, with shorter branches, pendulous branchlets, paler appressed leaves, its wood a duller red, with thin white sapwood, its bark near the ground 1 to 2 feet thick, and its cones much larger (2 or 3 inches long). It forms a series of forests in Tulare county, California, isolated groves extending 240 miles northward, and it has been recently (November, 1890) reported from southern Oregon. The tallest tree now known, one of the Calaveras grove, is 325 feet high; one known as the Grizzly Giant, in the Mariposa grove, is 93 feet in circumference at the ground; 1,200 rings were counted in a tree 11 feet in diameter. Both species were early classed under Taxodium (which see), their nearest American living relative; a closer ally, however, is Athrotaxis (Don, 1839), a genus of three Tasmanian trees distinguished by a cone with mucronate or umbonate scales; their other living relatives are a few distant and mostly monotypic genera of Japan and China. (Compare Taxodinæ.) A very large number of fossil species are known with certainty, showing that the genus was much more abundant in late Cretaceous and Tertiary time than at present.

Wiktionary

1. n. Sequoiadendron giganteum, a coniferous evergreen tree formerly in the genus Sequoia, now placed in Sequoiadendron.
2. n. Sequoia sempervirens, a coniferous evergreen tree, the only living species of the genus Sequoia.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. (Bot.) A genus of coniferous trees, consisting of two species, Sequoia Washingtoniana, syn. S. gigantea, the “big tree” of California, and S. sempervirens, the redwood, both of which attain an immense height.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. either of two huge coniferous California trees that reach a height of 300 feet; sometimes placed in the Taxodiaceae