Dawn Redwood

The dawn redwood, or Metasequoia, is dropping its leaves.

Bald Cypress

Taxodium distichum, like Metasequoia, is a deciduous conifer: unlike most cone-bearing trees, its changes color and drops its leaves in the fall. The feathery leaves are made of needles that appear two-ranked but are actually arranged spirally on branchlets.

The globular cones are covered with peltate scales.

Here are two bald cypresses side by side. The far one has turned red ahead of its neighbor.

Bald cypress has a conical shape when young. At maturity, it has a more cylindrical form with a rounded top. Bald cypress is also called swamp cypress because of its occurrence in low, wet land. When it grows near or in water, woody knobs protrude up from the roots. These "knees" were thought to help with oxygen intake, but the current dominant theory is that they help provide stability in loose substrates.

These cones are closer to maturity.



Behind each scale, there are two seeds. Although bald cypresses are known for their ability to live in flood-prone areas, seeds immersed in water will not germinate. Seedlings have to establish themselves in well-drained or saturated soil before they are able to survive in standing water.

Dawn Redwood

This tree was first discovered in 1941 when a Japanese paleobotanist was reclassifying fossils that had been erroneously identified as Sequoia and Taxodium. He determined that not only were they fossils of a different species, they needed to be placed in a new genus. Given the tree’s similarities to the Coast (or California) redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), he named the new fossil genus Metasequoia.

Meanwhile, in Modaoqi on the Sichuan-Hubei border, a Chinese forester came across a small population of a tree he had never seen before. It was unknown and left unstudied until after the war. It turned out to be the same tree that was identified in fossil form as Metasequoia. The tree was given its species name, glyptostroboides, because of its resemblance to Glyptostrobus, the Chinese swamp cypress. The common name, dawn redwood, emphasizes the tree's early fossil record.

The dawn redwood was introduced to the United States and Europe around 1948. (It was actually re-introduced to the United States. There are fossils from California that show it inhabited the continent about 15 million years ago.)

The dawn redwood is a conifer. Here are two unripe cones.

Most conifers are evergreen, but the dawn redwood is deciduous. These leaves will turn reddish-brown and will be shed in the fall.