The 1948 Dawn Redwood of the Chinese Hillside

Until 1944, the dawn redwood was known only as a fossil, a conifer botanists assumed had died out millions of years ago. Then a Chinese forestry official spotted an unfamiliar deciduous conifer growing near a village in central China, and by 1948 the find had become one of the great botanical events of the century: the Arnold Arboretum in Boston organised a seed-collecting expedition to the same valley and mailed packets of Metasequoia glyptostroboides seed to institutions worldwide, ending a species' presumed extinction in a single shipment. The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh was among the recipients, and five specimens grown from that original 1948 consignment still stand scattered through the garden today, sharing one accession number and one origin story. This is the one on the Chinese Hillside, a short walk from the garden's other Inverleith trees. A dawn redwood grows fast for a conifer, which is why this one is barely 75 years old and already substantial, deciduous unlike almost every relative it has, its needles turning rust orange before dropping each autumn. It is not RBGE's oldest tree by a long way. It is one of the closest things botany has to a resurrection story, planted the decade the species seemed impossible.