The Dawn Redwood by the Lake

The Botanic Garden calls this the first dawn redwood to grow on British soil since the Mesozoic era, the age of the dinosaurs. Its seed was collected in China in 1946 and 1947 and sent by a Dr Silow to Professor F. T. Brooks in Cambridge. Two seedlings were planted out beside the Lake in 1949, according to that year's annual report. The garden has kept a record of its growth ever since. It was 1.5 metres tall in 1952, 17 metres by 1977 and close to 23 metres in 2002, the last figure published. In that same year it was chosen as one of fifty Great British Trees to mark the Queen's Golden Jubilee. That puts it at about 77 years old, young by the standards of this site but with a lineage most old trees cannot match. Emmanuel and Clare colleges also hold dawn redwoods from the same collection, by their own accounts, so the claim to be first is the garden's. The tree stands on the south-western shore of the Lake, next to the garden's giant redwood, two very different trees with the same family name side by side. Unlike most conifers it drops its needles in winter. In late autumn they turn a foxy reddish brown before they fall. The garden is ticketed, fifteen minutes on foot from Cambridge station.