The Dawn Redwoods of Elizabeth Street

Until 1941 this species was known only from fossils. Botanists had described Metasequoia from imprints in stone and filed it under extinct, and then living trees turned up in a valley in Hubei province, China. Every dawn redwood outside that valley descends from seed collected there in 1947 and posted around the world, which makes the three on the road reserve outside 81 Elizabeth Street the great-grandchildren of a botanical resurrection. There are three of them, within about twenty metres of each other in front of the former Commonwealth Bank building, and the City of Hobart's significant tree register treats them as a single record rather than three, because the group is the point. Its reasoning is unusually direct: the trees together provide a striking aesthetic in a sparsely vegetated part of the city, and they are locally very recognisable. Stand at the kerb and you get all three at once. That register is also all there is. No other source names these trees, and no planting date is recorded anywhere, so their age is genuinely unknown, with one hard ceiling: nobody outside China could have planted one before 1947. Dawn redwood is one of the few conifers that sheds its needles, so the trio go coppery and then bare through a Tasmanian winter and come back feathery green in spring, which for a fossil is a reasonable annual performance.