The Dawn Redwoods of TU Delft's Botanic Garden

Every dawn redwood alive today, anywhere in the world, descends from a single discovery: a species known only from 150-million-year-old fossils, presumed extinct, until a forester found a living stand of it in a remote Chinese valley in 1944. An international seed-collecting expedition followed in 1947, and botanical gardens across Europe, including several in the Netherlands, raised their first Metasequoia glyptostroboides from that single haul. Two of them now dominate the middle section of TU Delft's Botanic Garden, tall enough to be the garden's own reference point long before a visitor reaches the rarer specimens around them. Nobody recorded the exact planting year for these two, so no source gives a precise age, only the certainty that they belong to the first generation of the species ever grown outside China since its rediscovery, making them roughly seventy to eighty years old by extension rather than by record. The garden charges standard admission and sits a short walk from Delft's main station, a working research collection rather than a park, with the redwoods' feathery, deciduous foliage turning copper in autumn before it drops, unusual for a conifer and part of what first convinced botanists this was something genuinely new.