It would have been the biggest tree alive today had it not been so ignominiously felled in 1890—reputedly to satisfy a drunken bet about making a table big enough to seat 40 guests from a single slice of tree-trunk.
But after a century of being left for dead, a giant redwood that grew as tall as a 30-storey building over the course of nearly 4,000 years in northern California is about to be reborn as a clone planted on the coast of Cornwall, possibly as early as this spring.
Scientists have managed to cultivate cuttings from the Fieldbrook Redwood Stump, which is 35ft (10.7m) in diameter, and 10 of its clones are now growing as knee-high saplings in the plant nursery at the Eden Project, near St Austell, as part of an ambitious plan to propagate and replant some of the oldest trees in America and Britain.