Dawn Redwood

Every dawn redwood on this page descends from one valley in central China. This page maps every dawn redwood on the site, 9 so far across 8 cities.

The species was known only from imprints in stone and filed under extinct until living trees were found there in the 1940s, and seed collected in 1947 and 1948 went out by post to botanical gardens around the world, which is where these came from. The rediscovery gets dated to 1941 and to 1944 depending on which step is being counted, and both dates turn up in the records behind these trees. They are young, most between sixty and eighty years old, and worth the walk anyway, because a conifer that turns rust orange and drops its needles every winter is an odd thing to meet. Portland's coned in 1952, the first any dawn redwood had done in the Western Hemisphere since the species vanished from it. Eight are mapped, spread from Hobart to Boston.

Dublin

The Glasnevin Dawn Redwood

roughly 65-115 years · Glasnevin

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.

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Edinburgh

The 1948 Dawn Redwood of the Chinese Hillside

roughly 75 years · Inverleith

Until 1944, the dawn redwood was known only as a fossil, a conifer botanists assumed had died out millions of years ago.

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Boston

The Original Dawn Redwood of the Arboretum

roughly 77 years, grown from seed collected in Hubei, China in 1948 · Arborway, Arnold Arboretum, Jamaica Plain

This tree grew from the seed shipment that put a fossil back into the ground.

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The Dawn Redwood of the Public Garden

roughly 63 years (planted 1963) · Beacon Hill / Public Garden

Until 1944 this species was known only from fossils and assumed to have been extinct for millions of years.

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Delft

The Dawn Redwoods of TU Delft's Botanic Garden

age undocumented, among the first of the species grown in Europe after its 1944 rediscovery · Wippolder

Every dawn redwood alive today, anywhere in the world, descends from a single discovery: a species known only from 150-million-year-old fossils, presumed extinct, until a forester found a living st...

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