Tree of the Week: Dawnredwood
I once wrote a poem of the seasons of dawnredwood, Metasequoia glyptostroboides. Let us deconstruct, starting with the name of this majestic tree, for as the Chinese philosopher Krishtalka noted: “The beginning of wisdom is calling things by their right name.”
The Latin binomial itself is telling: “meta-sequoia” means “like-sequoia”, and dawnredwoods are related, in the Cupressaceae family, to the true redwoods, Sequoia and Sequoiadendron. The “glyptostrob-oides” refers to another sister genus in the Cupressaceae, Glyptostrobus....