Birr Dawn Redwood

Until the 1940s, science knew the dawn redwood mainly as a fossil. Living trees were found and described in China between 1941 and 1948, and seed travelled west soon after. Birr Castle says some of that first seed reached its gardens in the 1940s, and that a fine tree from that period still stands. That makes this one of the youngest trees on our Irish map and, in a sense, one of the oldest. Its line runs back through the fossil record. Its own trunk runs back about eighty years, to seed that reached Birr while the species was still news. The national heritage tree register lists a dawn redwood at Birr as an exceptional specimen, aged 50 to 100 in 2009, and it is the tree pinned here. The estate's page does not locate its 1940s tree or measure it, so the match between the two rests on species and age, not on anyone saying so outright. It is a conifer that behaves like a broadleaf. The needles come out bright green in spring and turn a foxy reddish brown in autumn, then drop, leaving a tall, fluted trunk bare all winter. No girth or height has been published. If you know either, tell us. The demesne is ticketed and open all year, with seasonal hours.