Dawn in a valley of Metasequoia (and Mie)

Last week the great gingko, today one hundred and eighty Dawn Redwoods, at dawn, in Beijing Botanical Garden (North). They were a little further up this valley, past the Mie Garden, displaying just some of the beautiful 380 or so Prunus mume cultivars.

It was April and the Dawn Redwoods were just coming into leaf (as were the gingkos in one of their possibly natural homes, which I'll write about next week).

Within a decade of the first botanical collection (aka the discovery to science) of the Dawn Redwood, Metasequoia glyptostroboides, seed of it arrived at the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria. I've told that story before, linking it to a dawn in Melbourne and the two specimens of this species we have surviving today.

In Beijing, not only did I see more living trees in the one place than I ever seen before, described as the largest planting of this species in northern China, but at the Beijing Botanical Garden (North) across the road, I was shown a fossil of an Metasequoia ancestor. This fossil is in the foyer of the largest herbarium collection (about 2.6 million specimens) in Asia, held by this Chinese Academy of Science administered botanic garden. You can see the similarity in leaf shape.

Like the Wollemi Pine (Wollemia nobilis), the plant of a form similar to the Dawn Redwood was described from a fossil, this time in 3.5-5 million year old rock found near Honshu, in Japan. The discovery of a living specimen closely allied to the fossil was a welcome surprise in the same year (1941) as the publication of the fossil name.

At the time of its scientific discovery Dawn Redwood was already widely planted near the persisting populations in the Sichuan, Hubei and Hunan provinces of central China. It just took some time for the distinctiveness of this tree to reach and be appreciated by local and world botanists.

In 1972, the Beijing Botanical Garden collected seed from near Lichuan and began to plant out this extensive collection in Cherry Valley. The locally unusual warm and humid climate here suits the tree. Already, according to signage, the tallest is 29 metres and just over 80 cm in diameter at breast height. 

Among the plantings is a segment of trunk, salvaged from a paddy field close to Xiaohe Town, Lichuan. The 'hundreds of years old' tree was felled in the 1950s but preserved under ground. It met the fate of many trees in the area after the revolution in 1949, and threats today continue to be farming and logging, as well as climate change.

The collection in Beijing Botanical Garden is mooted as a conservation as well as landscape importance, presumably due its origin from wild-collected seeds. When botanic gardens can create something so beautiful, so boastful, and still full of meaning and value, they are doing their job well.