It was introduced when Japanese chestnuts were imported, bringing with them the pathogen, to which they were immune. We are referring, of course, to the American chestnut, virtually destroyed in the first half of the 20th century by the chestnut blight, a fungus that killed billions of chestnuts in North and South America and Europe. Brad also likes to garden, and the Dawn Redwood isn’t the only tree that’s come back to life. Heidi loves talking with visitors, and Brad does woodworking, maintaining the gardens’ crop of natural wooden benches. The pair moved to the Triangle to be near their children when they retired, and the gardens turned out to be a great place to volunteer. Heidi’s husband, Brad Wilson, also volunteers at the gardens. “My husband is doing the same thing with chestnuts.” That tree even has a plaque telling the story, which got volunteer Heidi Wilson thinking. Scientists at Harvard then propagated the seeds, and hundreds of thousands grew into enormous trees all over the nation, including one in the gardens.

“When word got out, especially to some scientists at Harvard,” Jones says, a young Chinese botanist was commissioned to gather some seeds. That was until 1944, when a Chinese botanist found a few specimens still growing in its native range in China. Culberson Asiatic Arboretum in the gardens. “It was actually given its name from a fossil, in the 1930s,” says Paul Jones, curator of the W.L. More important, though the Dawn Redwood was one of the most widespread species in the northern hemisphere during the Tertiary period, it was long thought to have gone extinct sometime after the end of that period, around 2.6 million years ago. First, it is a deciduous conifer: it drops its needles, like a bald cypress, whereas most conifers are evergreen. The gardens’ Dawn Redwood, Metasequoia glyptostroboides, is an unusual redwood for two reasons. If you’ve seen the Dawn Redwood in Duke Gardens you know that trees do, in a way, come back from the dead. Originally perceived as a happy ending, the book is now seen as something of a cautionary tale, not just about trees but about boundaries.Īt Duke Gardens they take much better care of their trees, and a current volunteer has a story that is almost the opposite of Silverstein’s - call it the Tree Giver. Boy grows up, moving from climbing and swinging to sawing and building, taking more and more from the tree until it ends with the boy returning as an old man to sit on the stump that is all that’s left. You remember the classic Shel Silverstein book The Giving Tree.

Metasequoia half import