One wet winter’s day, high school student Zane Moore strolled through the Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park in Northern California. He watched raindrops splatter the green leaves and the brown trunks of coastal redwoods. Then his jaw dropped. In a ring of dark redwoods shone a solitaire, a tiny tree so “vibrant white,” Moore says, that it shocked him. A white tree that wasn’t covered in snow? How was this possible? Now a graduate student in botany at the University of California, Davis, Moore has been working to understand the answer to this question.
Pearls in the Forest
Forests of thousands of coastal redwoods cover the mountains of Northern California and Oregon. They almost look like deep green seas. But concealed beneath this canopy, along the forest margins, are about 400
