dawnredwood
Secrest: Apres le Gel
Secrest Arboretum: Early May, 2020: Part I
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....
Japanese Beetle Centennial
Japanese beetles on a linden leaf or on a rose leaf or flower - to this we are accustomed. On certain plants though, such as cut-leaf rhamnus or as shown here from Wooster, Ohio on dawnredwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides); somehow it seems like they do not have enough of a perch or dining area. Perhaps it is the small-plates phenomenon. At any rate, the chewing-mouthparts damage here is quite familiar and Popillia japonica damage to the turf and ornamental industry is huge. In fact, a 2002 paper by Dan Potter and David Held of the University of Kentucky (Annu. Rev....