Tour Detail

The dawn redwood is in the Cypress family and is one of three species of needle-leaved trees on campus that lose their needles in the winter. It is a fast-growing, deciduous tree that produces rounded cones. It is a unique redwood as it is smaller and deciduous, therefore producing colorful leaves that shed in the fall.

During the Tertiary period, this tree was one of the most widespread species in the Northern Hemisphere. It was first discovered in 1941 in Japan as a fossil in 5 million-year-old sediments, and later identified in fossil remains throughout Asia, North America and Greenland, making it originally thought to be extinct. However, in 1941, a Chinese forester identified an enormous dawn redwood in the Sichuan province of China. Thousands more were found growing in the region’s lowland canyons, where rice and other crops are cultivated. This specimen at Notre Dame was brought to the U.S. between 1947 and 1948 by a botanical expedition sponsored by Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum that collected seeds and distributed them worldwide. The dawn redwood, once thought to have been extinct for 20 million years, now has living representatives around the world, including on our own campus.