What Is the Biggest Tree in the World? General Sherman, Hyperion and Other Giants

Stand at the foot of a giant sequoia and look up, and it is hard to make sense of what you see. The trunk is as wide as a road, the bark is as thick as a mattress and the crown disappears high above. Some of these trees were already old when the pyramids of Giza were young. Here are the record holders of the plant world, and the reasons they can grow so big.

Biggest and tallest are not the same

When people ask about the “biggest tree”, they might mean different things:

• Biggest by volume: the tree with the most wood in its trunk.
• Tallest: the tree with the greatest height.
• Widest: the tree with the thickest trunk or the largest crown.

Each record belongs to a different tree.

General Sherman: the biggest tree on Earth

General Sherman grows in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park in California’s Sierra Nevada. According to the US National Park Service:

• its trunk has a volume of about 1,487 cubic metres,
• it is about 84 metres tall, with a base circumference of about 31 metres,
• the trunk alone weighs nearly 1,400 tonnes,
• it is estimated to be more than 2,200 years old.

The Park Service notes that the tree contains enough wood to build around 120 average-sized houses. It is not the tallest tree, nor the widest, but no other known single tree holds as much wood.

General Sherman is a giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum), a species that grows naturally only in about 70 groves on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada.

Hyperion: the tallest tree

In 2006, two naturalists exploring a remote valley in Redwood National Park found a coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) about 116 metres tall. They named it Hyperion, after a Titan of Greek mythology. It is taller than the Statue of Liberty with its pedestal, and as tall as a 35-storey building.

Coast redwoods grow along a narrow strip of the Pacific coast, where frequent sea fog keeps them moist in the dry summer. Their needles can even absorb water directly from the fog. To protect Hyperion from crowds, its location has never been officially published, and visiting it off-trail is forbidden.

Menara: the giant of the tropics

For a long time, the tallest trees were thought to grow only in temperate forests. Then, in 2019, researchers in Sabah, on the island of Borneo, measured a yellow meranti (Shorea faguetiana) at about 100 metres. Named Menara, Malay for “tower”, it is the tallest known tropical tree and the tallest flowering plant on Earth. Redwoods and sequoias, by contrast, are conifers.

How do sequoias grow so big?

Giant sequoias combine several advantages:

• Thick bark: up to about 60 centimetres thick, spongy and low in resin, it protects the tree from fire and insects.
• Fire as a helper: moderate fires clear competing plants and open sequoia cones. The seedlings then sprout in the sunlit ash.
• Water: snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada keeps soils moist through the summer.
• Constant growth: sequoias never really stop growing. Even very old trees keep adding wood every year.

This resilience has limits. Unusually severe wildfires in recent years, worsened by drought and heat, have killed many large sequoias. During a fire in 2021, firefighters wrapped the base of General Sherman in protective foil.

Why can’t trees grow forever?

If trees keep growing, why are there no 200-metre trees? The answer is water. Trees pull water from the roots to the leaves through tiny tubes, drawn up by evaporation from the leaves. The higher the water has to go, the more it is pulled by gravity and friction.

In a 2004 study in Nature, George Koch and colleagues climbed the tallest redwoods and measured their leaves. Near the top, the leaves were smaller and under heavy water stress. From these measurements, they calculated that the maximum possible height for a tree is roughly 122 to 130 metres, not far above Hyperion.

Is a tree the largest living thing?

General Sherman is the largest single-stem tree, but some living things are even larger. Pando, an aspen colony in Utah, looks like a forest of tens of thousands of trees, but genetically it is one individual connected by a single root system, often described as one of the heaviest organisms on Earth. Some fungi spread underground over several square kilometres.

In short

• The biggest tree by volume is General Sherman, a giant sequoia of about 1,487 m³.
• The tallest known tree is Hyperion, a coast redwood about 116 m tall.
• The tallest tropical tree is Menara in Borneo, about 100 m tall.
• Giant sequoias survive thanks to thick bark, fire-adapted cones and snowmelt water.
• Lifting water to the top limits trees to roughly 122–130 m.
• Pando, a clonal aspen colony, is often cited as heavier than any single tree.