Metasequoia flourished in the Miocene epoch of 25 to 5 million years ago and left its record embedded in rocks across the Oregon landscape. State Fossil of Oregon: The Oregon legislature designated the Metasequoia as the official state fossil in 2005. 'Miss Grace' - more or less ground sprawling, but if staked, a small tree with weeping branches.'Gold Rush' - bright yellow foliage in spring and retains much of the color throughout the summer.Several cultivars are available, including: Hardy to USDA Zone 4 Native to Sichuan (Szechuan, Szechwan), China. Easy to transplant, performs best in moist, well-drained, slightly acid soils. Pollination occurs in early spring and the seeds in the female cones are mature by the fall. (However, because of western Oregon's wet, but mild, winters, the cones are not dry enough to open and release the seeds until the following spring.) The female (seed) cones are solitary, oval, green then light brown, about 2 cm long male (pollen) cones are arranged in long pendant clusters, each cone is globose and about 5 mm long. Bark reddish brown when young, darker, fissuring, and exfoliating in strips when mature. The trees are monoecious, both male and female cones on an individual plant. Dawn Redwood is a deciduous conifer producing small, round 1/2' to 1' cones. Needles are arranged in opposite pairs, each is about 15 mm long, straight or slightly curved, bright green above, light green below. An ancient tree that knew the dinosaurs but is well-suited to modern landscape plantings. Deciduous conifer, 70-100 ft (21-30 m), excurrent, pyramidal, flat topped when mature.Perhaps it is simply biding its time until conditions are back to normal-as far as it’s concerned-when it will expand again and reach its roots around ancient rocks that to it look like mirrors. Like a tide expanding and contracting, the population of the dawn redwood came and went countless times over its long history, finally ending up in a few small populations in the mountains of rural China. It’s easy to imagine a carpet of spire-like trees with feathery foliage covering the northern reaches of the earth, and shifting down and back again as conditions dictate. What today is often a very harsh and cold environment occupied by only the toughest of trees was historically warmer, wetter, and far more hospitable. We can use what we know about the tree today to understand what the dawn redwood’s world might have been like yesterday (geologically speaking). But we have the luxury of understanding how this tree grows today and what conditions it prefers or tolerates. The story these fossils tells us is one of climactic and tectonic shifts. In places like Badlands and Yellowstone National Parks in the United States, there are entire fossilized logs of dawn redwood preserved for all to see. Metasequoia Rust is an uncommonly occurring fungal disease in spring.
Metasequoia glyptostroboides lose their leaves free#
The rest of the story goes back nearly 100 million years and traverses the Northern Hemisphere.įossils of dawn redwoods are found commonly throughout northern North America-they are in fact the official state fossil of Oregon-and northern Asia. Dawn Redwood is relatively free of pests. Finding a long-lost tree still alive and kicking only catches us up to the present day. The story of the dawn redwood doesn’t end there.
Suddenly, the world had a new species of redwood that long ago was thought to have gone the way of the dodo. Dawn Redwood Metasequoia glyptostroboides, located within the Rose Garden Lawn is one of only 20 species of conifers that lose their leaves. Little did he know that just a few years later a Chinese forester would stumble upon the real thing in a remote region of China (where the locals knew it as the water fir). The dawn redwood ( Metasequoia glyptostroboides) provides us just such a moment.įor centuries the dawn redwood was only known from fossils, and was given its scientific name by Japanese paleobotanist Shigeru Miki in 1941.
It’s a true rare moment when we get a chance to see one in the wood, as it were. We can only know or imagine what they looked like with glimpses into the past through the fossils we find that contain their likenesses. As far as we know, all of these proto-trees have gone extinct and passed on their niches to the next wave of evolutionary newcomers. The first trees that resemble something we would recognize today started to appear around 360 million years ago. I mean trees in the broadest sense, as a collection of organisms. I’m not speaking of the age of a given specimen, like Methusela. But rarely do we actually consider just how old. ‘Trees are generally really old all the time.’ Ah, that old chestnut. Native to (or naturalized in) Oregon: Deciduous conifer, 70-100 ft (21-30 m), excurrent, pyramidal, flat topped when mature.
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