I love the story of the Dawn Redwood. It always gives me faith that despite all technology and science, the mystery of this world will continue to amaze us forever. Although the Dawn Redwood has been growing on this planet for over 50 million years, it was not until relatively recently that botanists and scientists even became aware that it existed as a species, and even then, they believed that it was extinct.
In the early 1940's, Dr. Shigeru Miki a Japanese paleo-botanist, was working with fossils from the Redwood Sequoia and Cypress trees from the United States. But what he found was not typical of either the Sequoia or Cypress trees. Both the Sequoia and Cypress trees had alternating leaves. The leaves of the fossils that he found were opposed to each other and were longer than the others. He realized that he had found a new genus of redwood and called it Metasequoia, meaning similar to the Sequoia (Meta is the Greek word for similar to). Unfortunately, he believed that it was extinct because the youngest fossils he had were over 1.5 million years old. However, he published his findings.
Surprisingly, in the same decade, but for an entirely different reason, living Dawn Redwoods were found in a very remote part of rural China. Foresters stumbled upon the small grove, and recognizing that they had never seen anything like these trees before, brought back samples. A Professor Hu with the Beijing Botanical Institute, realized after examining the leaves and having read Dr. Miki's article, that he was looking at a very much alive and not fossilized Dawn Redwood. Steps were taken to preserve the trees found only in the provinces of Sichuan and Hubei as there were only around 1000 trees alive. Villagers, not realizing what they had, had been using the trees for their daily living, feeding their cattle and using the wood for construction.
If you saw a Dawn Redwood, no doubt you would remember it. A mature tree can be over 200 feet, although most are in the 100's. It is tall with a more slender trunk than the massive trunks of the California Sequoia Redwood tree. The branches are symmetrical and curved or sloped upwards. The Dawn Redwood's bark is similar to the Sequoia with the same reddish hue, although it is more delicate (if bark can be delicate) and not as rough. The leaves/needles are almost feathery and bright green. They turn an amazing copper in the fall before they fall. A Dawn Redwood is truly a beautiful tree.
The Dawn Redwood holds a special place in my heart as we had one in our yard when we lived in California. For 25 years, it provided beauty and shade, faithfully shedding it's needles in the fall and then once again growing them in the rebirth of spring. It provided beauty to our backyard wedding ceremony, provided branches to climb for our growing children, and was a constant memorial for the various cats, dogs, turtles, and mice that were buried at it's base with little wooden crosses. Since we've moved, it's not the house or town I miss, but my own personal Dawn Redwood with it's amazing history.
