The Dawn Redwood was quite successfull in hiding from the botanists. It wasn`t a question of size, for in its home it grows as high as 40 meters. Relatives of this tree were well known to botanists, but only as 70 million years old fossiles from coal mines in Manchuria. It was generally accepted that the genus Metasequoia had died out millions of years ago. This was wrong for in 1941 a Chinese botanist discovered an unknown tree in a village in Sichuan. Because of the war it took another five years till his discovery became known worldwide. Soon botanists realized that the newly discovered tree was a thought-it-had-died-out-Metasequoia. Equaly soon it was discovered that there were only three specimen of it left in Sichuan. Some months later another population of some thousand specimen was discovered in the neighbouring province Hubei.  It was high time for the discovery since the trees were in high demand among the natives as construction and fire wood. A few years later the tree would have been probably extinct.

Dawn Redwood grows extremly rapid if grown on moist soil. After only a few years it will be as high as 10 meter - and from now on it takes it time for further growth. In Germany the highest Dawn Redwoods are about 20 meters high. They grow on Island Mainau in Lake Constance and were planted in 1952. Nobody can tell how big they will grow in the end. The tree isn`t sensitive to frost, it survived temperatures as low as - 30 ° C. Our plants are two years old seedling, now about knee high. As soon as they will be planted out, they will probably go like hell.