08/14/2026
Part 7: Ghost Redwoods. As if coast redwoods weren't weird enough already, occasionally they become ghosts. Let me tell you about it.
Scattered through the redwood forests of Northern California are strange white sprouts known as “ghost redwoods.” They are the same species as every other coast redwood around them (Sequoia sempervirens) except their needles appear completely white. They aren't dead. Dead leaves are red. They are living redwood tissue that contains no chlorophyll, the green pigment found in nearly every plant on Earth. They only survive because they come from a host mother tree.
Unlike most conifers, Sequoia sempervirens is an enthusiastic clonal sprouter. New trunks can even from sliced burls if you leave them in water. More than a century ago, botanist George James Peirce demonstrated that albino redwood shoots couldn't survive independently. Later grafting experiments by Humboldt State forestry professor Rudolf Becking showed that attaching white tissue to green tissue didn't make the white needles turn green. The albinism was intrinsic to the tissue itself.
A 2018 study compared normal green redwood shoots with naturally occurring albino ones. The researchers detected no chlorophyll at all and measured no photosynthetic carbon gain under light. The albino leaves continued respiring, however, meaning they were still burning carbohydrates while producing essentially none themselves. Even weirder, the ghosts were wasting water like crazy.
Their stomata, the microscopic pores that control gas exchange and water loss, showed conductance roughly two to three times higher than neighboring green foliage. Their xylem (the natural plumbing), meanwhile, remained surprisingly normal. The researchers concluded that the albino foliage was being kept unusually well hydrated by the vascular system supporting it. In short, mama wasn’t giving up on her baby!
The albino redwoods expose one of the strangest consequences of coast redwood biology: a mutation that would be lethal to basically another tree persisted because redwoods’ network of interconnected trunks, roots, and sprouts share water and carbon. There is no equivalent phenomenon documented in giant sequoia or Metasequoias.
In the comments I will post some links for you to do a deeper dive into the strange biology of ghost redwoods. Please check out my page for the upcoming essays in this series, "Plants & the Emerald Triangle," as well as previous natural history essays like "The Geology of the Emerald Triangle," and true crime essays like "Mel Frank the Mindf*cker."
Photo Credit: National Geographic ("Searching for California's Mysterious Ghost Redwoods"). Note: the location of the redwood is not provided.
