Jeffrey Williams, age 10, of Petersburg, Virginia, for his question:

Are redwoods native only to California:

California is the home of both the coastal redwood and the sequoia redwood. The tallest of these stately giants live along the western slopes of the Coastal Mountains, and there are still some in Oregon. Here the filmy grey fogs drift in from the sea and the great trees get the misty climate they need. In the past, their magnificent for¬ests covered two million acres. They spread in a narrow belt, about 30 miles wide, from southwestern Oregon 500 miles down into California. Now they occupy less than a third of their ancient territory. Many of the great trees are as tall as 30 story buildings and a few are much taller. Some of them have lived 1,000 years and some are almost 2,000 years old.

The sequoia redwood is not as tall as the coastal redwood, but it has a wider trunk and it may live 3,000 or maybe 4,000 years. The sequoias grow farther inland, on the cool western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Their territory is a narrow belt about 250 miles long, down the central region of California.

However, there is another cousin, called the "dawn redwood" that was discovered in China in the middle of this century.