Dawn redwood is a lovely tree, very popular in botanical gardens here. When I was at university in the late 60s specimens were pretty uncommon and all still quite immature. It was regarded as a very exciting discovery by us botany students. A real live living fossil. These days we also have the Wollemi pine from Australia, not discovered until 1994. We have a specimen at the Eden Project in Cornwall.

The two species, giant redwood and coast redwood, have been regarded as being in different genera for decades. Their leaf structure and arrangement are quite different. They are related but not that closely. Typical of yanks, they share the plaudits for biggest and best. The giant redwood is easily biggest by bulk, in fact they are the largest individual organisms on earth. But the coast redwoods, a bit slimmer, are the tallest trees on earth and they live longer on average than giant redwoods. Not anywhere near as long as bristlecone pines, however.

I went through a phase of studying conifers at university. For my sins I did my final-year research project on the morphology of the eleven cultivars of the Leyland Cypress, a much-despised tree this end. Only two of those cultivars ever became commonly grown. Thank goodness!