The Dawn Redwood of the Botanical Garden

Until 1943 this species was known only from fossils. Metasequoia had been described from stone and written off as long extinct, and then living trees turned up in central China and seed went round the world's botanical gardens within a few years. Which means every large dawn redwood in Europe can be dated to within a human lifetime, and this one is among the first of them: it was planted in the Frankfurt Botanical Garden around 1950, as a cutting. Seventy-five years later its trunk measures 5.72 metres round at chest height, which the German Dendrological Society ranks as the second thickest recorded specimen of its species in the country. It is a conifer that behaves like a broadleaf, putting out soft feathery needles in spring and dropping every one of them in autumn once they have turned rust orange. It stands in the East Asia section, opposite the flat-roofed building and to the right of the bee house, which is precise enough to walk to. Entry to the Botanical Garden is free. The Palmengarten and its two protected beeches are next door, so the two gardens make a single afternoon, and the city added this tree to its register of natural monuments in 2025. The odd thing to hold in your head under it: this tree is younger than the news of its own species, and it is already one of the biggest in Germany.