Of interest this week at Beal...

Dawn Redwood Metasequoia glyptostroboides Family: the Redwood family, Taxodiaceae Also called Chinese water fir W. J. Beal Botanical Garden The Dawn redwood, Metasequoia glyptostroboides, has certainly one of the most noteworthy histories, both in geological time, and in its human-contact history. It has survived to our time since the late Cretaceous period, the last third of the Mesozoic era. This species is in fact one of a handful of extant plants that were known from fossils before they were noted in the present. There are so many excellent Dawn redwood fossil sites from the early Tertiary, the time after the Cretaceous and the dinosaurs, in the American West, that Metasequoia has been designated as Oregon’s official state fossil.

In modern times, Dawn redwood was first noted in the winter of 1941 by Professor T. Kan of the Department of Forestry of the National Central University while traveling from Hupeh to Szechuan. He saw a giant tree the locals called a shui-sa, or water fir, but, as it was winter and it had no leaves, no collection was made. Professor Kan requested that the principal of the local agricultural high school collect specimens, but this apparently did not happen. In the summer of 1943 (or 1944 depending on the author) while on an expedition to Shen Nong Jia in northwestern Hubei, Chan Wang of the National Central Bureau of Forest Research became ill and took refuge at the Wan Xian Agricultural School

and was told by the principal about a huge unknown tree, about 100 km away. He changed his plans and went there where he collected some branches and found some cones on the roof of a small temple nestled beneath the tree (new cones were out of reach). Eventually, specimens made it to W. C. Cheng and H. H. Hu who first recognized that this new species belonged to a genus recently (1941) described by Miki, from fossils, in Japan. Seeds were first collected in 1947 by W. C. Cheng who sent some to Dr. Merrill, of the Arnold Arboretum in 1948 (and simultaneously to Europe as well). Dr. Merrill sent them to some 76 institutions and botanists to found the North American population.

In the late 1980s, the remnants of a mummified forest were found on Axel Heiberg Island in the Canadian Arctic islands. This deposit of Eocene age (approximately 45 million years old) is mostly comprised of Dawn redwood forest debris from a time when the Arctic was The seeds of Dawn redwood, Metasequoia glyptostroboides, are winged for distribution by wind. Ascending to a height of at least 170 feet (52 meters) affords an excellent launching altitude for seed distribution in their native mountainous terrain in south central China. In warmer periods of Earth history, Dawn redwood was much more widely distributed in the northern hemisphere.

much warmer and more moist. This treasure trove of ancient forest litter is not actually fossilized, just dried and slightly compressed. Some unthinking folks have actually burned some of the ancient logs as firewood. Since these islands have not moved far since Eocene times, these specimens demonstrate that a forest, accompanied by crocodilians and primates survived in a place that was in darkness for three months out of every year.

Dawn redwood trees are robust and fast-growing. They can be acquired from nurseries and seem to flourish in our temperate climate again, after a break lasting millions of years.