The Living Fossil of the Dominion Arboretum
How do I find it? You can recognise it by the needles: it is a conifer that turns and drops them in autumn. It stands in the northern section of the Arboretum, where two more dawn redwoods grow, one of them the 'Jade Prince'.
Botanists had a name for this species before anyone had seen one alive. Metasequoia glyptostroboides was known from fossils and assumed extinct until living trees were found in central China in the 1940s, which is why it gets called a living fossil and why arboretums everywhere wanted one. This one grows in the northern section of the Dominion Arboretum, and the National Capital Commission's register singles it out as one of the few conifers that loses its needles in the fall. That is the thing worth timing a visit around: a tree that reads as an evergreen all summer turns, drops its foliage and stands bare through an Ottawa winter. The register says the species can reach 35 metres and three metres through where conditions favour it; in this climate the Friends of the Central Experimental Farm put the Arboretum's specimens nearer 25. One honest warning before you walk out there. The Friends' CelebriTrees tour lists three dawn redwoods on these grounds, one on Heart Island and two in this northern section, one of them the 'Jade Prince' cultivar. The register entry carries no tree number to match against theirs, so the tree at this pin may be one of those or a fourth nobody has catalogued. No age, planting date or girth is recorded anywhere. If you know when it went in, tell us.
- Species
- Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides)
- Age estimate
- not documented
- Location
- Dominion Arboretum, Central Experimental Farm, Ottawa, ON (northern section of the Arboretum) (Central Experimental Farm / The Glebe)
- Access
- Free. Inside the Dominion Arboretum at the Central Experimental Farm (a National Historic Site of Canada); open dawn to dusk year-round, no entry fee, free parking on site (Friends of the Central Experimental Farm visitor information).
- Getting there
- About a 10-15 minute walk from Dow's Lake, where the Century Willow and Turn-of-the-Century Linden (ott_013, ott_014) stand at the south end of Queen Elizabeth Driveway; OC Transpo stops serve Prince of Wales Drive and Carling Avenue at the farm's edges.
The button above opens directions in your maps app.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
- canada-capital-ncc-remarkable-trees (objectid 51, NCC 'A Living Legacy')
- friendsofthefarm.ca
Trees nearby
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Ticking this one off, walks past several more, and your collection growing city by city: that is the Ancient Trees app.
Get the appThis page was researched from a distance. If you know this tree, you know things we do not: the species, the age, the size, whether the photo shows the right tree, or that it is gone. Every field on this page can be corrected.
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