In 2008, Michigan arborist David Milarch began cloning ancient coast redwoods from old stumps, preserving genetics nearly erased by logging

Somewhere in the fog belt of Northern California, giant redwood stumps still sit where loggers cut them down more than a hundred years ago. Most people see dead wood. David Milarch saw a second chance. According to Yale School of the Environment, Milarch and his team have cloned and grown saplings from the stumps of some of the world's oldest and largest coast redwoods, trees that were up to 3,000 years old and measured 35 feet across when they were logged in the 1800s and 1900s.

Milarch is a third-generation nurseryman from Copemish, a small town in northern Michigan, far from any redwood forest. The Archangel Ancient Tree Archive's team page mentions that Milarch has spent decades in propagation and reforestation, working alongside his sons Jake and Jared. The team has been collecting cuttings from champion and ancient trees since 2008. Their aim is simple: save the genes of the world's oldest, biggest trees before those genes disappear for good.

Why old stumps still had life left in them
Redwoods rarely die completely. Even after a tree is cut down, its roots can send up new sprouts, sometimes called "fairy rings," around the stump. According to Yale School of the Environment, Milarch and his son Jake discovered living tissue growing from the roots of stumps that other arborists had assumed were dead, including the Fieldbrook Stump in Humboldt County, California, one of the largest coast redwood stumps on record.

Turning a fingertip-sized cutting into a full tree
The cloning process does not involve any gene editing. Arborists climb the stumps or nearby sprouts and snip small green cuttings, each about the size of a fingertip, which are then flown to the Archangel lab in Michigan. There, the cuttings go through a process called micropropagation, which coaxes a tiny piece of plant tissue to grow roots and become a full, genetically identical sapling. Growing a single cutting into a plantable tree takes roughly two and a half years, the Yale School of the Environment notes.

This works partly because coast redwoods, or Sequoia sempervirens, are unusually good at cloning themselves in the wild. According to a 2015 study titled ‘A genotyping protocol for multiple tissue types from the polyploid tree species Sequoia sempervirens (Cupressaceae),’ published in the journal Applications in Plant Sciences, redwoods carry six full sets of chromosomes, far more than most trees, which helps them regenerate readily from stump sprouts and root shoots. The same study developed a DNA test that can confirm whether a new sprout is a true genetic match to its parent tree, a method that has since helped verify cloning projects like Milarch's.

From a dead stump to a living forest in San Francisco
On December 14, 2018, the Archangel team planted 75 coast redwood saplings, cloned from five different ancient stumps including Fieldbrook, in the Presidio, a park in San Francisco. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports that Milarch said he was the most 'thunderstruck' he had ever been when he found the original stumps. Milarch also estimates that 95 percent of all redwoods have already been cut down, which is part of what makes preserving their genetics so urgent.

Why this matters beyond nostalgia
For anyone who has stood under a redwood on a California road trip and felt genuinely small, this project is not just a curiosity; it is an attempt to keep that feeling around for future generations. Old-growth redwood forests are more than pretty scenery. According to a 2022 study titled ‘Rangewide climatic sensitivities and non-timber values of tall Sequoia sempervirens forests’ published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management, led by Cal Poly Humboldt professor Stephen Sillett, individual redwoods can keep growing productively for well over 1,000 years, and an acre of old-growth redwood forest can store close to 890 metric tons of carbon, which is roughly what 700 passenger cars would emit in a year. According to the same study, less than 5 percent of the original old-growth redwood forest survived the logging era of the 1800s and 1900s.

That is the gap Milarch's project is trying to close. By propagating clones from trees that already proved they could survive fires, droughts, and centuries of weather, Archangel hopes to give new forests a genetic head start that most young trees never get.

A long game, one sapling at a time
The Presidio grove is still young, and it will take decades, not years, before anyone can call it a true "super grove." Redwoods that size took a thousand years or more to grow the first time around. But for a species that has lost most of its old-growth range to logging, a fingertip-sized cutting from a 3,000-year-old stump is not a small thing. According to Yale School of the Environment, it is a working attempt to give ancient forests a second life, grown one careful clone at a time.