The Surprising Science of Redwood Fairy Rings

Redwoods Are Born Survivors

Coast redwoods have weathered centuries of earthquakes, wildfires, storms, and droughts. Yet many still stand hundreds of feet tall and can live for well over a thousand years. How do these sentinels survive? Scientists are finding some clues in the redwood genome, including genes that help these trees respond to stress, disease and injury. Fairy rings are another remarkable part of their resilience.

Make It Sensory: Rest your skin against a coast redwood’s bark and imagine the generations of life it has witnessed. The trunk before you may be centuries old, but its story is still unfolding. Beneath the forest floor, a new chapter may already be taking root.

How Their Roots Work

The Santa Cruz Mountains are famous for their tallest trees, but some of their most remarkable stories reside underground. Their root systems, for example, are spectacular and quite different than you might think! It’s natural to assume trees this massive have equally massive roots, plunging into the earth like inverted skyscrapers. Surprisingly, coast redwood roots are relatively shallow — typically just 6 to 12 feet deep, or roughly the height of one or two people. These not-so-deep roots spread outward as far over 100 feet, intertwining and merging with those of neighboring redwoods to form a sturdy, living foundation. This root structure gives redwoods an extraordinary ability to regenerate. 

Make It Sensory: Breathe in the cool, earthy scent of damp soil and fallen redwood needles. Beneath that soft carpet of forest duff, an unseen network of roots and fungi is quietly at work, connecting trees, recycling nutrients, and supporting the next generation of forest life.

How Fairy Rings Form

When a mature tree is damaged by fire or wind, cut down, or simply dies of old age, its roots can send up new sprouts around the remaining stump. Because these young trees are already bonded by an established root system, they have access to water and nutrients from the very beginning, giving them a big head start over seedlings. As the parent tree slowly decays and disappears, the new generation often grows in a near-perfect circle around where it once stood.

Make It Sensory: Refill your own energy with a sip of water and a shareable snack. Then imagine the hidden network beneath your feet. Just as hikers rely on one another, connected redwoods benefit from a shared root system that provides young sprouts with water, stored energy, and a strong foundation for life.

Family Circles

Human families include all kinds of relationships, from blood relatives to chosen kin. Redwood families are just as complex, but with one big twist: clones. Outside of science fiction, human children are never exact genetic copies of their parents; by contrast, coast redwoods can reproduce by sprouting genetically identical trunks from the base of an existing tree. Research has found that fairy rings — sometimes called family circles — often include a fascinating blend of genetically unique redwoods, trees of other species, and clones of the original parent tree.

Make It Sensory: Standing in the redwood forest, count the trunks that surround you.

They may look like individual trees, but many are siblings connected by the same underground family.

Giving the Next Generation Room to Grow

In forests that were harvested unsustainably in the past, fairy rings can grow too close together, leading to unhealthy forest conditions. In some areas, there are now more than 200 redwood stems per acre, compared with roughly 20 to 30 large redwoods in an old-growth forest. This crowding creates competition for water, nutrients, and sunlight, while increasing the amount of burnable material between trees. These fuel ‘jackpots’ can burn intensely enough to overwhelm even redwoods’ thick, fire-resistant bark.

To restore healthier conditions, foresters use restoration thinning. They select the two or three healthiest trees in a fairy ring — the “winners” most likely to become the old-growth giants of the future — and remove some of the competing stems. It may seem counterintuitive, but cutting some trees gives the remaining redwoods more space and resources to grow larger, stronger, and more resilient to fire. The goal is to help these forests develop the healthier spacing and structure they had before widespread clearcut logging.

Make It Sensory:  Stand beside a large tree, close your eyes and look up.  Through your eyelids, can you feel the darkness of the tree’s canopy?  Now find a gap in the trees, close your eyes, and look up again.  Through your eyelids, can you feel the brightness of the sunlight?  Imagine being a tree, in a race for the life-giving sunbeams.  Where would you rather take root?

The Parent Tree Slowly Disappears

Over time, the original parent tree slowly decays. Rain, insects, fungi, and other forest organisms recycle its wood back into the ecosystem, nourishing new life. Eventually, the massive trunk may disappear altogether, but its legacy lives on. Its roots can remain alive and connected to the surrounding trees, supporting the family long after the original trunk is gone.

In some working forests, fairy rings can also provide a sustainable source of local timber. By carefully harvesting an individual tree from a ring every 15 to 20 years, foresters can provide wood while giving the remaining trees more room to grow and reducing fuels that can intensify wildfire. It’s another way these remarkable redwood families can support both healthy forests and nearby communities for generations.

Make It Sensory: When you encounter a fairy ring, stand where the parent tree once stood. Imagine the giant that anchored this family centuries ago. Though the trunk may be gone, its legacy still surrounds you.

Dancing Fairies & Underground Castles

Across cultures, mysterious rings of mushrooms have inspired stories of supernatural visitors. In Europe, some people claimed they mark places where fairies danced beneath the moon. In Japan, they were thought to surround the underground castles of spirits.  Some legends claimed stepping inside a fairy ring would bring good luck, whereas others had foreboding consequences. Fairies could whisk you away to their magical realm or leave you dancing to the point of exhaustion, madness, or even death.

Make It Sensory: Wander the forest in the early morning when the fog hangs between the trees. Listen to the rustle of leaves overhead and the birds calling through the canopy. It’s easy to understand why people once imagined magical beings gathering in places like this.

Why Fairy Rings Matter

Understanding fairy rings reminds us that caring for a forest means caring for the connections within it. Every recovering redwood grove tells a story of resilience, shaped by generations of trees, healthy soils, fungi, wildlife, and the relationships that tie them together.

That perspective shapes how POST approaches stewardship. By protecting entire ecosystems and supporting the natural processes that help forests regenerate, we can help these remarkable redwood families continue to thrive for centuries to come.