Ella Young and Redwoods
Hearing the forest
There’s a truth and a lie about Ella Young and Redwood trees.
Well, not a lie, but a mistake. The mistake is a widely disseminated idea that Ella Young donated her estate to the Save the Redwoods League in California. What she actually did was give most of her estate to her sister, Elizabeth. The League was named in her will as the residuary legatee. In correspondence reprinted in Dorothea McDowell’s book (Ella Young and Her World), the League claimed to own copyright of fourteen poems in Celtic Wonder Tales but we can’t find documentation of that arrangement. It doesn’t matter now, because that entire book is in the public domain, and you can download a copy of it from the Internet Archive.
It’s true her ashes were scattered by friends in 1956 under redwoods in St. Helena. These are not the old growth “towering redwoods” like Muir Woods, but the slender daughters of old trees now logged.
Recently we received a notification from another redwood forest charity, the Sempervirens Fund. They have made available a beautiful recording of the coastal redwood forest that you can listen to right now.
If you are interested in imagining Ella Young’s world, this is exactly how it sounded in her lifetime, for thousands of years before and for thousands of years into the future.