The Beliny-Prazmowskiego Dawn Redwood

This species was described from fossils before anybody found a living one. Until 1941 the dawn redwood existed for Western science as an imprint in rock and nothing else; then living stands were identified in central China, and seed reached gardens outside the country around 1947. That history puts a hard ceiling on the tree outside number 38 on al. Beliny-Prazmowskiego. No specimen of its kind in Poland can be much more than seventy-five years old, and this one already carried two metres of girth when the Malopolskie voivode made it a protected natural monument in April 2004, which places it somewhere between fifty and seventy-five years. Young for this list, and old for a species that spent the twentieth century starting again. It is a deciduous conifer, which is the thing to watch for. Soft flat needles come out pale green in spring, hold all summer, turn rust and fall, and the tree stands through the Krakow winter as a bare fluted spike among evergreens that keep theirs. The trunk folds and buttresses at the base as these do with age. Two records carry it, the national register of natural monuments and the city's own list of protected trees, and neither says who planted it or when. If you know, tell us.