Redwood ecology — fog drip, fire resistance, burl sprouting, and the aerial ecosystems living hundreds of feet up in the canopy.
Let me tell you how these trees pull it off, because it's genuinely strange. First, the fog. A redwood can't pump water three hundred feet up easily, so it cheats — it drinks through its NEEDLES, combing moisture straight out of the summer fog that rolls in off the Pacific. In a dry season, fog drip can supply up to about a third of the water this forest gets; the trees essentially make their own rain. Second, fire. That bark is a foot thick, spongy, and it has almost no resin in it — it just doesn't burn well. Look for blackened hollows at the bases, big enough to stand inside; those are old fire scars, and the tree simply walled the wound off and kept growing. Third, and my favorite: they barely bother to die. Cut a redwood down and it sprouts a ring of clones from the burl at its stump — those perfect circles of trees you see are called fairy rings, all one organism around a vanished parent. And up in the canopy, hundreds of feet over your roof, there's soil, and ferns, and huckleberry bushes, and salamanders that live their entire lives up there and never once touch the ground.