Tree of the Week: The dawn redwood

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The Dawn Redwood -- Metasequoia glytptostroboides

Japanese paleobotanist S. Miki described samples of Metasequoia in 1941 as a separate fossil genus, not belonging to the same genus as the California redwoods. Four years later, forest researcher Z. Wang found four unknown trees in a temple near China’s Sichuan province. A year later, Beijing professors Hu and Cheng organized another expedition to find more of these new trees. It turned out that Miki’s 100-million-plus-year-old fossils had direct, living relatives. Much of the remaining tree population was logged after the revolution of 1949.

The original tree population is critically endangered in its native habitat of the damp ravines of west China’s Sichuan, Hubei and Hunan, but in the meantime the tree has spread all over the world (seeds made it to the Boston, Mass., Arnold Arboretum in 1948). The original trees came from too few seeds and suffered from genetic shortcomings; later seed collecting in China corrected this shortcoming.

The dawn redwood is one of the few deciduous conifers. The tree can grow quite fast (4 to 6 feet a year when young in California) and so far reaches a pyramidal 90 feet tall by 20 feet wide. The thin branches are arranged around a stout, reddish-gray and peeling central trunk with fissured bark. Older trees show wide buttresses on the lower trunk. In older trees the bole may become beautifully contorted if not stripped of its branches.

In leaf the tree resembles the bald cypress, Taxodium distichum, as well as the coast redwood, Sequoia sempervirens. The opposite, bird-feather-like rows of half-inch-long small leaflets are beautiful softgreen; they turn apricot before falling off in autumn, together with the annual twigs. Cones are up to an inch in size. The tree will take to any well-drained soil, or even wet soil, but loves regular moisture; it is not a tree for dry spots. It will grow in a lawn, but eventually it may develop surface roots. It does not like desert heat or salt air, and is resistant to oak root fungus.

A few cultivars are available: the bright green ‘Emerald Feathers’ and the narrow, conical ‘National.’

-- Pieter Severynen

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