BY KYNA RUBIN

The 1940s discovery in China of the dawn redwood, a living fossil, remains in shadows cast by war, political upheaval, and scholarly intrigue.
From the January 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.
On a clear August day in 2002, Ma Jinshuang, a botanist, struck gold. At the bottom of a cabinet in a dark, moist, long-abandoned herbarium in Nanjing, perched unprotected on top of the conifer specimens, lay a barely intact cluster of twigs and needles. A rotting heap of nature, to most eyes.
But Ma had spent years finding the pile?the lone survivor of a lost series of specimens that, in 1940s China, led to the botanical find of a century: a living fossil we now call Metasequoia glyptostroboides, or dawn redwood. Its discovery captivated the world, especially the American public, and made possible the myriad dawn redwoods we see today in cities, parks, and campuses on nearly every continent. Metasequoia dots cemeteries in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Louisville, Kentucky. A million dawn redwoods line either side of a 30-mile-long avenue in the city of Pizhou, in Jiangsu Province. They can be seen in Chile, Japan, England, and Zimbabwe. The tree?s easy cultivation in temperate climates around the globe contrasts with its increasing rarity in wild form in China, where its habitat is in decline.
Metasequoia has long been found in fossil form across the Northern Hemisphere from North America to Russia to Japan. Its fossils are so common in eastern Oregon t...