The Original Dawn Redwood of the Arboretum

This tree grew from the seed shipment that put a fossil back into the ground. In 1948 the Arnold Arboretum took delivery of seed collected in Hubei, China, from a species that had been known to science only from fossils until living trees turned up in the interior a few years earlier. The seed was raised here, and the Arboretum's own account of what came up is worth quoting: the first of its kind to grow in North America in over two million years. The accession number is 524-48. From that lot and its siblings, dawn redwoods went out to gardens across the world, which is how a tree that was a rumour inside living memory became an ordinary sight on ordinary streets. It stands near the Hunnewell Visitor Center, opposite the Arborway Gate, so it is the first thing worth walking to once you are through. It is also fifteen years older than the dawn redwood in the Public Garden across town, and its senior in the plainest sense: same species, same 1948 seed, one generation up. One honest note on the record. A separately numbered 1948 accession is described elsewhere as the Arboretum's oldest dawn redwood, out along Conifer Path, and we could not establish whether that is this tree under a second label or a sibling raised from the same seed. Both came off the same shipment.