North Fourteenth Street is about as close as I have ever been to Italy; but amongst all the Green foliage here, I can find a bit of White albino Redwood foliage. It is a ‘sport’, which is a silly word for mutant growth. Because it lacks chlorophyll, and is consequently unable to photosynthesize, it is reliant on resources that it draws from the tree that generated it, which has a canopy of normal green foliage. Because of this reliance, copies of this mutant growth can not be grown as cuttings. Such cuttings simply could not sustain their own growth. I have made a few unsuccessful attempts to graft this mutant growth onto normal trees. The scions deteriorate before they can graft. I should try again. This foliage really is as strikingly white as it looks in pictures. I am certainly no expert on floral design, and I know that this foliage does not last for long once cut, but I suspect that it would look striking with black bearded iris or black hollyhock, or on a smaller scale, with black pansies or black petunias. Heck, it might likewise be striking with white flowers. In the early 1970s, albino redwoods, which are merely albino sports of normal redwoods, were considered to be very rare, with only a few documented specimens. Although they really are quite rare, many more have been documented since then, and many more, such as this specimen, remain undocumented. I wrote about this albino redwood foliage a few years ago, and was reminded of it by the wildlife photographer of Portraits of Wildflowers near Austin. Except for a few trees that are barely north of the border with Oregon, coastal redwood is exclusively native to the West Coast of California. It is the tallest tree in the World.