Dawn in the redwood forest

VIC LEIPZIG AND LOU MURRAY

Vic found some old friends in Huntington Central Park last week. In

fact, they are over 100 million years old. That’s even older than

Dick Clark. OK, the individuals aren’t that ancient, but their

species is. These “friends” are a grove of very rare and fascinating

trees that had previously escaped our eagle eyes.

The tree story actually begins with an Internet bulletin board

called the Orange County Rare Bird Alert. This list lets subscribers

know where to find rare birds that pop up in the county. The people

who operate the bulletin board are creating a detailed map of Central

Park in order to give birders more precise directions when a rare

bird is spotted. They asked Vic to help identify some of the features

of the park.

One mystery that the mapmakers needed to solve was the identity of

a grove of shapely, straight-trunked trees planted in the southeast

portion of the park. Vic and I walked over and took a look at them.

With open foliage and branches that started high up the trunk, the

trees were certainly unusual. The trees appeared to be conifers, but

we knew that they lost their needles in winter just like a deciduous

tree loses its leaves. A deciduous evergreen is an oxymoron.

Vic and I were stumped, so Vic called Ron Foreman, acting head of

the city’s parks, trees and landscape division. His answer was a

shocker. Ron told us that the trees were dawn redwoods.

The scientific community didn’t discover redwood trees until the

mid-1850s. For about 100 years, botanists knew of only two living

species in the redwood family: the coast redwoods of Northern

California and their relatives, the giant Sequoias, which are found

in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Both were formerly more

broadly distributed. Coast redwoods and giant Sequoias now grow in

only a small fraction of their former range.

Many millenia ago, coast redwoods grew in this area. We’re told

that some of the groundwater wells in Huntington Beach are discolored

from ancient redwoods that are still lying underground. Early local

Native Americans made plank canoes out of the huge redwood logs and

used them to paddle to the Channel Islands. With the changing climate

at the end of the last Ice Age, redwoods died out in Southern

California and became restricted to the Northern California coast.

Native Americans then reportedly used redwood trees from the north

that had died and floated down here on the tides. Seems far-fetched

to us, but stranger things have happened.

In 1941, a Chinese forester made a remarkable discovery -- a third

species of living redwood tree. Instead of growing in California like

the others, this one grew only in a remote forest in Szechwan

Province. The ravages of World War II made scientific follow-up

impossible at that time, but in 1946 China’s leading tree experts

were able to examine the specimens. They came to an astonishing

conclusion. These were living fossils.

The scientists identified the trees as dawn redwoods, a tree that

was presumed to have gone extinct 5 million years ago. That’s even

older than the leftover lasagna in the back of our refrigerator. Our

pre-human ancestors were swinging through the jungle in Africa and

horses were tiny, three-toed critters the size of greyhounds back

then. A tree that had thrived from 100 million years ago to 5 million

years ago had been rediscovered.

In 1947, botanists at the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University

brought seeds of the dawn redwood to the USA. They distributed seeds

all over the world and now the tree is in cultivation in many

locations -- including our own Central Park.

It was at Harvard that Vic first encountered the dawn redwood.

Back in 1973, he was a bearded, pony-tailed hippie studying biology

at Harvard for the summer. As a Californian raised in Redwood City,

he expressed interest in this rare species of redwood. The curators

gave him a seedling in a plastic pot. During the drive back to

California that fall, all the needles fell off Vic’s seedling. He

continued to water it for months. Finally he concluded that it was

dead. He thought that perhaps it had overheated in the car during the

trip across the country. Disappointed, he threw it out.

No one had told Vic that dawn redwoods lose their leaves in the

autumn just like maples and sycamores and other broad-leafed trees.

Vic’s little seedling wasn’t dead, it was just sleeping for the

winter. Vic had unwittingly sent it to that big final sleep.

Thirty years later, Vic has rediscovered his old friend, the dawn

redwood. There are sixteen of them in Central Park. The branches of

these tall, red-barked beauties are so high above ground that it’s

hard to notice that their flat needles are almost identical to those

of coast redwoods. And since they are deciduous, most folks would

never guess that they are conifers, most of which are evergreen.

It’s nice to have a bit of living history right here in town. Go

for a walk in Central Park and discover them for yourself.

* VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and

environmentalists. They can be reached at vicleipzig@aol.com.