The Cantonspark Dawn Redwood

Until 1941 this species existed only as a fossil. Botanists had described Metasequoia from imprints in stone and assumed it had been gone for millions of years, and then a stand of them turned up alive in central China. Seed went out to the world's botanical gardens within a few years, and Baarn got some of it. This tree germinated around 1948, which makes it one of the first generation of dawn redwoods to grow in Europe since the species disappeared from the record entirely. It has grown fast. It measured 4.22 metres around in 2008 and 5.10 metres by 2021, and over roughly the same decade its height went from 25.4 metres to 28.2. By the standards of its own kind it is still a child. The park explains the company it keeps. Cantonspark was laid out in 1902 as the private garden of the industrialist August Janssen, taken over by Utrecht University in 1918 as its botanical garden, and handed to the municipality as a free public park in 1987. Seven decades as a teaching collection is why a Dutch village park holds a living fossil, a giant sequoia and a pinetum. One honest note. The most recent confirmation we could find, measurements and dated photographs, is from October 2021, and a reader's correction has since moved the pin closer to a cluster of conifers in the old pinetum, so it still marks this corner of the park rather than a confirmed exact stem.