Seven 700-year-old trees sit under a 13-watt fluorescent lamp on Rick Mock's dinner table in this small town west of Astoria.
All are living pieces of what is thought to be one of the oldest living things in Oregon: the giant Sitka spruce along U.S. 26 near Seaside known as the Seaside Spruce or Klootchy Creek Giant.
Until December's intense windstorm blew most of the tree over, it was tied with a spruce in Washington as the largest tree of its kind.
Mock is trying to keep its legacy alive by rooting seven pieces from the tips of a branch he found on the hulking piece of trunk that fell to the ground in December. So far, so good. He points proudly to tiny new green needles sprouting from one.
The Klootchy Creek spruce -- what's left of the tree that was once 200 feet tall -- stands in a Clatsop County park, so Mock figures his cuttings also are county property. He plans to turn them over to the county as soon as he's sure they'll survive.
Steve Meshke, head of Clatsop County's parks, said he's glad Mock is trying to keep the tree going, although Meshke has been so busy cleaning up other parks after the storm he hasn't had a chance to see the cuttings.
He's also careful to say that people shouldn't disturb what remains of the tree, which still has one green limb attached. It would be nice, he said, if one of Mock's cuttings eventually could be planted near what remains of its parent.
Long odds
Mock said he read up on the Internet about how to grow a spruce from cuttings and came away assuming it would be nearly impossible. The odds of survival drop when the cuttings come from older trees, he learned, with only a 20 percent chance that a cutting from a 60-year-old tree would grow.
Cuttings from a 700-year-old tree seemed like a long shot.
"At that point I had given up, basically," he said. "I figured there was no chance."
But something about the tree, where he sometimes stopped to eat his lunch and linger, kept nagging at him.
"For some reason it just kept popping into my head," he said. "Something that's been around that long -- there's got to be something special to it. Something about it allowed it to escape the ax."
So he visited the tree Jan. 27 and, amid others collecting chunks of the fallen giant as souvenirs and keepsakes, he pruned a small, still-green branch off the downed section of trunk, put it in his van and drove home. He stopped on the way to pick up basic gardening supplies such as peat pots and gravel.
"Sleeping Giants"
He cut seven tips off the branch, popped them into the pots with potting soil and set them under a fluorescent light on his family's dinner table. A sign on an adjacent door says: "Please close the door carefully -- Sleeping Giants."
Mock, who runs computer systems and does a variety of other work for the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, enjoys gardening and admits to a bit of a green thumb. An aloe in his house overflows its pot, and a vine -- he's not sure what it is -- flourishes above his kitchen sink.
But he's no expert, he admits, noting that he lacks the fancy greenhouses and chemical solutions some people use to sprout cuttings. He fashioned makeshift humidity tents around the cuttings with Ziploc bags.
"There's no high technology going on here," he said.
He studies the seedlings carefully each day and feels pretty confident now that most will survive. In a week or so, he figures, he will pull the plastic bags. A week or so after that he thinks they'll be ready for turning over to the county.
Meshke isn't sure what the county will do with them. He's gotten requests from people who wanted chunks of the tree to turn into totem poles, guitars, furniture and who knows what else.
"You name it, I've had calls about it," he said. He's turned them all down because "I could dole it out to people all over the U.S., and there'd be nothing left."
Paul Ries, an Oregon Department of Forestry arborist, said he has talked with the county about trying to grow seedlings from the giant spruce, using either seeds or cuttings. He said there's a limited window of time since the tree fell when cuttings from it would be likely to take root.
But the agencies haven't attempted to create any offspring.
Mock would like to see one of the seedlings planted near the state Capitol, perhaps. He said Meshke told him that the county couldn't let him keep one of the seedlings but that he would at least get "visitation rights" wherever the new generation of Klootchy giants end up.
"I just hope she lives another 700 years," he said. "That would be my reward, even if I don't get one. I probably don't need another plant anyway."The Oregonian
