Wollemi Pine (Wollemia nobilis) at Brooklyn Botanic Garden
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The first specimen of Metasequoia glyptostroboides Hu and Cheng collected by Chan Wang from the Type Tree, July 21, 1943. (Photograph by Jinshuang Ma, August 13, 2002)
Metasequoia glyptostroboides
The Dawn Redwood: A Botanical Detective Story
At first glance, Jinshuang Ma seems an unlikely character in one of the world's leading botanical mystery stories. But for the past seven years, Brooklyn Botanic Garden's unassuming botanist, born to a farming family in the remote countryside of Jilin Province in northeast China in 1955, has been working to untangle conflicting accounts of the discovery and subsequent dispersal of the dawn redwood, Metasequoia glyptostroboides, one of the greatest botanical finds of the 20th century—and one of the world's most imperiled plants.
The story began in the late 1930s, when a Japanese scientist first discovered the beautiful conifer in fossils dating back millions of years. He presumed this close relative of California's redwoods had long been extinct. In 1943 Chan Wang, a Chinese dendrology professor, was traveling through a mountainous area in central China when the head of a local agricultural school asked him to take a look at an unusual, large tree growing by the local temple. Professor Wang examined the tree and collected samples of its cones and leaves. He was convinced it was different from any other tree he'd ever seen. The specimen was shared with other botanists, who recognized that the tree was the same as the ancient species in the fossil the Japanese paleobotanist had found.
Needless to say, the tree generated considerable excitement—it was, after all, the botanical equivalent of discovering a dinosaur alive and kicking in the 20th century. By the late 1940s, Chinese scientists had sent seeds to botanic gardens around the world, including Boston's Arnold Arboretum. Around the same time, Ralph Chaney, of the University of California in Berkeley, found his way to the mountainous dawn redwood region of China—no easy feat in those days—and managed to return home with seeds and several seedlings.
After the People's Republic was founded in 1949, the story of the discovery and collection of Metasequoia was largely forgotten in China for decades. During the Cultural Revolution, between 1966 and 1976, many of the original research materials, including the records of Chan Wang and the original specimen he had collected, were destroyed or lost. The tree was disappearing from its native habitat, and its history in the annals of science was also becoming lost in the mists of time.
Enter Dr. Ma, destined to become one of the world's leading experts on this rare botanical relict from an ancient era. He became intrigued by the dawn redwood story after a special issue of the journal Arnoldia was published by the Arnold Arboretum, marking the 50th anniversary of the arrival of seeds there in 1948. Ever since, he has devoted himself to sorting out erroneous accounts of the species' discovery and tracking down trees that grew from the seeds distributed around the world. The fate of these trees is of more than passing interest, since the species is now critically endangered in the wild.
So far Dr. Ma has compiled more than 1,000 records of dawn redwoods thriving in cultivation in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Europe, as well as China—the tree is one of the few deciduous conifers, and its handsome rosy bark and fabulous fall foliage color have made it increasingly popular in horticulture. He has launched a website devoted entirely to the Metasequoia story, www.metasequoia.org. But perhaps his greatest discovery came in 2002, when he was in China for the First International Metasequoia Symposium. After the meeting and a field trip to the valley where most of the remaining wild trees are found, he visited a succession of Chinese herbaria in search of Chan Wang's original dried specimen, which had been missing for decades. Finally, at the bottom of an old cabinet at Jiangsu Forestry Academy in Nanjing, he discovered a dusty pile of herbarium sheets bearing the mark of Professor Wang. The first scientific specimen of dawn redwood, collected atop a temple almost 60 years earlier, had been found!