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Redwood is an amazingly unique wood when you look into its unique structure. In the early 1980’s, I was fresh out of college with degrees in chemical engineering and microbiology and working my first job in industrial environmental technologies in the R&D department of a multinational chemical company. They threw big $$$ at me to spend setting up a lab and pilot plant capability and among the toys I acquired was a then $40k research grade Zeiss microscope . Amazing tool.

One occasion, I examined some pine and redwood that had been exposed to some very severe conditions in a cooling tower used for direct contact with a process water. Pine was destroyed and redwood just seemed immune to the damage.

I had among other optics, a nomarski interference contrast setup for the Zeiss. The 3D like and color image at 400-800X magnification was stunning in detail. Pine fibers are sort of like spaghetti noodles where you line them up parallel by hand then try to hand stack a 2nd, 3rd, etc. layer on top of them giving quite a bit of imperfection and randomness. Nature was messy in creating pine. Redwood is the complete opposite of pine. Think of pine being a clown car and redwood being an Aston Martin. Tight, orderly layers of cellulose with these layers separated by a strong sheet of cellulose, all of which infused with tannin. Too bad redwood trees don’t grow like a weed like southern pines.