A double row of yews in Ireland's national botanic garden may predate the garden itself by roughly sixty years.
Ancient Trees in the National Botanic Gardens
The Dublin Society founded the National Botanic Gardens at Glasnevin in 1795 to teach scientific agriculture, and the collecting habit that started then never stopped.
A 2009 heritage survey by the Tree Council of Ireland recorded six of these seven trees as Exceptional Specimen Trees, gathered from three continents across two centuries of curators, all within 200 metres of each other: a dawn redwood grown from the seed that ended the species' presumed extinction in China, an Atlas cedar from a mountain range now losing its wild population to drought, a Caucasian elm so admired a County Offaly nurseryman propagated cuttings from it and sold the result as its own named cultivar, and a bald cypress built for Louisiana swampland doing its best in an Irish flower bed. The seventh and oldest, a formal double avenue of yew, carries the garden's separate Named Trees designation and is said, by tradition rather than record, to have been planted in memory of the essayist Joseph Addison before the gardens themselves existed. Entry is free, every day except Christmas Day, and all seven specimens sit an easy afternoon's walk from each other.
All 7 stand in Dublin, which maps 17 remarkable trees in total.
A nurseryman in County Offaly once took cuttings from this exact tree and started selling clones of it.
The Atlas Mountains cedar growing in Glasnevin is safer here than at home.
A tree built for Louisiana swampland grows in a Dublin botanic garden, and it still remembers where it came from.
The largest Ailanthus altissima in Ireland stands framed between two Victorian glasshouses in Dublin, and nobody agrees on how old it actually is.
Peel back the bark on this tree and you find a second colour underneath.
Until 1941, botanists knew the dawn redwood only from fossils, certain a conifer that shed its needles every winter had gone extinct millions of years earlier.
Opening times and visitor information: National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin.
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