Common Name:
Dawn Redwood

Scientific Name:
Metasequoia glyptostroboides

Plant Description

The Story of the Dawn Redwood
An excellent description of the discovery of Metasequoia glyptostroboides by scientists in the 1940s is in, A Reunion of Trees, by Stephen A. Spongberg, Harvard Univ. Press, 1990.

Briefly, in 1941 Shigeru Miki, a Japanese paleobotanist, established a new genus, Metasequoia, to accommodate Pliocene fossils from deposits about five million years old. The fossils had previously been confused with Taxodium (bald cypress) and Sequoia (redwoods). Also in 1941, a Chinese forester chanced upon a strange deciduous, coniferous tree near a remote village in eastern Szechwan Province. In 1944 a few leafy branches from the trees and some cones picked from the ground were passed on to a botanist, W. C. Cheng, at the National Central University. He thought the plant samples might be from the Chinese swamp cypress (Glyptostrobus lineatus), but was frustrated by the incomplete specimens. In the winter and spring of 1946 more complete specimens were collected and it was determined that the trees were not the Chinese swamp cypress.

Cheng thought the tree represented an undescribed species and a new genus and in the fall of 1946 sent herbarium material to Dr. H. H. Hu, director of the Fan Memorial Institute in Peking (Beijing). Hu was aware of Miki's article and noted the similarity of the Miki's fossils and the specimens he received. Herbarium specimens were also sent to Professor Elmer D. Merrill of Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, who immediately corresponded with Professors Cheng and Hu, requesting seed and providing funding to them for a special seed-collecting expedition. The expedition was undertaken and seed arrived at Arnold Arboretum in early January and in March 1948, and was immediately shared with institutions and individuals around the world.

In the same year Professors Hu and Cheng described the new conifer in the Bulletin of the Fan Memorial Institute of Biology. The tree was given the name Metasequoia glyptostroboides Hu & Cheng. The generic name, first used by Miki, was derived from the Greek meta, meaning alike or akin, and Sequoia, the generic name of the coast redwood, to which the tree resembles. The specific epithet, glyptostroboides, is a reference to the genus Glyptostobus, the Chinese swamp cypress with which the tree was initially confused. The popular common name of Dawn Redwood, was a suggestion of Ralph W. Chaney, a professor of paleobotany at the University of California, Berkeley. The use of "dawn" in the name was an attempt to emphasize the tree's early fossil record.

Plant Profile & Needs:

Hardiness Zones: 4-8
Habit: Deciduous
Growth Rate: Rapid
Site Requirements: Sun; moist well drained soil
Texture: Fine
Form: Pyramidal; conical; straight trunk; broad spreading crown
Height: 50 to 90’
Width: 15 to 25’
Leaf: .5" opposite leaves; soft, light green feathery; brown fall color
Flower/Fruit: Flowers not showy; .7 to 1" dark brown cones on long stalks