Dawn Redwood Trees Metasequoia glyptostroboides

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Dawn redwoods once blanketed the entire Northern Hemisphere and were thought to have been extinct for millions of years until their rediscovery in 1941 by a Chinese forester in a remote corner of the Sichuan (at the time, Szechuan) Province in south-central China. Somehow, a little over one thousand trees had survived for millennia in a region that ironically is not even Metasequoia’s ideal environment! How then, did it survive in the Shui-sha Valley when it perished elsewhere? That is one of the great modern silvicultural mysteries.

Doug Hanks © 2005