![]() David Noble was a national parks officer and keen rock climber and in 1994 found a tree he didn't recognise. There was huge excitement when it was found in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales by one of the happy accidents that delight historians. Actually not a pine, but a member of the same family as our kauri, wollemi-like fossils have been found in New Zealand. The second ancient conifer is Australia's wollemi pine ( Wollemia nobilis). A large tree, dawn redwood is most suitable as a standalone specimen.Ī gingko in autumn in the Dunedin Botanic Garden. Male and female flowers appear on the same tree, the females eventually producing round, green cones. Mr Matthews was away when the leaves turned brown in its first autumn and his wife, not realising the tree was deciduous, panicked as she thought it had died. glyptostroboides is a tall (35m) tree, whose delicate green foliage in spring is followed by dark green summer colour, then orange-red in autumn.Īt Tupare, Russell and Elizabeth Matthews' extensive garden in New Plymouth, the dawn redwood was highly prized. Eastwoodhill then gave trees to two Taranaki gardens, Tupare and Pukeiti, and Auckland Domain. It was supplied by a NZ Forest Service Nursery in Bulls. The records of Eastwoodhill Arboretum, near Gisborne, note that a tree was planted in the winter of 1949. ![]() New Zealand did not miss out, as dawn redwoods were established from seeds sent from China. Seed was distributed around the world, including to Hilliers Nurseries, in England, which began selling seedlings in 1949. The Arnold Arboretum obviously had an active PR department, as the US press trumpeted the tree as a living fossil. glyptostroboides seed arrived in the United States. Photos: Gillian Vine As soon as he saw Dr Hu's samples, the arboretum's director funded a Chinese seed-gathering expedition and in 1948, M. This dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) at Tupare, in Taranaki, is one of New Zealand's oldest. The epithet " glyptostroboides" was added to indicate the new tree's resemblance to the Chinese swamp cypress, although it is now usually referred to as dawn redwood. Dr Hu believed the plant to be Dr Miki's Metasequoia. Hu sent a specimen of the Kan tree to the Arnold Arboretum, part of the Harvard complex. Nothing further happened until 1946 when Harvard-trained Chinese botanist Dr H.H. Subsequently, another Chinese forestry official collected samples from what was probably the same tree. Kan found a large conifer in a shrine in a village in Szechuan-Hubei province. Then, in the same year as Dr Miki's discovery, Chinese forester T. He named it Metasequoia ("sequoia-like"), as the leaves resembled those of the Californian redwood ( Sequoia sempervirens). In 1941, Dr Shigeru Miki, of Kyoto University, found a new genus (plant family) while studying 136-million-year-old fossils from the cypress family. Paleobotanists spend their days looking at ancient plant remains, using long-extinct fossils to work out what grew on earth millions of years ago and to trace modern plants' heritage.Įvery now and then, they make an extraordinary discovery as a trio of conifers demonstrates. Gillian Vine marvels at three conifers that have survived for millions of years.
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