Kristina Schenck's Interactive Media

Remember those Christmas trees that are sprayed white with some type of foam that mimics snow? Super tacky, probably full of horrible chemicals, and in no way can they actually smell as good as unsprayed trees.

But I always, for some odd reason, begged my Dad to buy one. Of course, he never did. Thankfully. It probably had something to do with the fact that it doesn’t snow in the Bay Area where I grew up, and until I was about 10, the artificial snow on those defiled Douglas Firs was about the closest I ever got to a white Christmas.

Albino redwoods are a rare but welcome parasite.
Photo credit: Stephen Harpe

Luckily, I discovered in my adult life that naturally white trees actually exist. Even better, my absolute favorite tree in the world, the California Redwood, comes in white as well. It’s somewhat of an obsession. They’re extremely rare, hauntingly beautiful, and the equivalent of a parasite.

That’s because white redwoods lack pigment due to a genetic mutation called albinism. Similar to albino people, animals, or other plants, albino redwoods lack the genes that produce pigments that reflect light in such a way that the color of the leaves appear green. For plants, green pigments are known as chlorophyll, and chlorophyll is extremely important for plants because it is a key pigment in photosynthesis that allows plants to absorb energy from sunlight. Thus, albino redwoods cannot produce their own energy, and must live off food provided by a host plant.

A large albino redwood tree growing next to the host plant.
Photo Credit: Jeff Ain

Which brings us to the question of how they grow in the first place. Redwood trees can reproduce a few ways, one being by sending up new shoots from the roots of an existing tree. An albino redwood will always be connected to a mother tree because it survives on nutrients from a host, thus making it a parasite.

Albino redwood trees are also extremely rare because redwood trees have a massive genome. A redwood cell contains six sets of chromosomes, whereas human cells contain just two sets of chromosomes . Chromosomes are comprised of a strand of DNA that contains genetic information. Albinism is a recessive trait, so in order for a specimen to display that trait, that gene must be present many times over. How many times, I’m not really sure. But it’s rare. There are only a handful of redwood albinos that are known to exist, and they’re even rarer because redwood trees grow only in a small area along the coast of northern California and in southern Oregon.

Redwoods grow naturally in certain areas along the coast of California and Oregon. Credit: Save-the-Redwoods League

There are a eight albino redwood trees at Henry Cowell State Park in California, about 45 minutes west of San Jose. The cool thing is that some of them are easily accessible and labeled on a map, whereas the location for a lot of the other albino redwoods up farther north are kept a secret. There’s one growing along the Redwood Grove Trail, which is a nice paved path that I think is just under a mile loop and is wheelchair accessible. Awesome.

The Redwood Grove Trail at Henry Cowell State Park runs between towering old-growth redwood trees. There’s an albino tree growing alongside a mother tree somewhere along the path. Where it is, sorry, I can’t tell you, sworn to secrecy. It’s easy to find, if you know what you’re looking for.

Lovely park, I recommend it to anyone. [display_podcast]