In spring the color of its foliage is bright green and turns to a beautiful foxy yellow and reddish brown in autumn. On the right you can see the typical base of a dawn redwood ( botanical garden of Ghent University).Īs opposed to the other sequoia species, this tree is deciduous (it looses its leaves in the autumn). On the left you can see an avenue of young dawn redwoods in a European castle garden ( castle De Eester in Belgium), with in the background the unmistakable top of a giant sequoia. In 1948 it was discovered that the species belonged to the already described fossil genus Metasequoia and, in an effort to preserve the tree species from logging, it was immediatly spread along arboreta everywhere in the world. Kan, a Chinese forester of Beijing National Central University, found three strange deciduous trees he had never seen before and during an expedition that followed, a lot of the trees were apparently still alive in a remote area in Southwest China. To summarize: at that time, the tree was only known as an fossil tree species, extinct for millions of years. Botanists think this species is the ancestor of the present day coast redwood. ĭue to its resemblance to the North American coast redwood ( Sequoia sempervirens), he named the tree species Metasequoia, which means 'almost a sequoia, sequoia-ish'. In 1941 Shigeru Miki of Japan was reclassifying fossil remains that had been incorrectly classified as Sequoia and Taxodium. This tree was once one of the most widespread tree species in the Northern hemisphere (during the Tertiary period).įossils have been found across the northern hemisphere, including Greenland and Spitzbergen, dating from when the continents were further south, and close together sharing a common flora.

The foliage of this Asiatic conifer is very similar to that of the North American bald cypress ( Taxodium distichum). The dawn redwood or just plain 'metasequoia' ( Metasequoia glyptostroboides) is one of the three species of sequoia (together with the giant sequoia, Sequoiadendron giganteum and the coast redwood, Sequoia sempervirens).

Metasequoia 316 serial