The Hoyt Dawn Redwood

Until 1944 the dawn redwood was a fossil. Botanists knew Metasequoia only from imprints in stone and assumed it had been extinct for millions of years, until a living stand turned up in a remote Chinese valley. In 1952 this tree, grown from that discovery, produced cones: the first any dawn redwood had produced in the Western Hemisphere since the species vanished from it. How long an absence that was depends who you ask. Portland's register says 8 million years. Travel Oregon and Hoyt Arboretum itself both say about 6 million. Neither number is the tree's age. They describe the gap in the fossil record, not the thing in front of you, which went into the ground in 1948 and is about 78 years old. The route here was fast by the standards of botany. Harvard's Arnold Arboretum organised an international seed-collecting expedition to the Chinese stand in 1947, Hoyt Arboretum was among the institutions sent seed, and the seedlings were planted the following year. Four years after that, cones. It is now 31.4 metres tall with a trunk 3.29 metres around, and it is an Oregon Heritage Tree. Late in the year it does the thing that makes dawn redwoods worth the walk up: a conifer that turns copper and then goes completely bare.