THE TREE THAT WASN’T DEAD

When we moved from Minnesota to Portland, Oregon, and found the home we’ve lived in since 1998, we inherited a Douglas fir-covered lot filled with trees—and, as it turned out, one extraordinary surprise

Some things needed tending immediately. There were diseased plum trees and underbrush to clear, so we asked a tree service to look everything over.

The Douglas firs were healthy. But one tree, they told us, had to go. It was a big one at the corner of our driveway—a towering conifer without a single needle on it. Obviously dead Or so they thought.

Fortunately, we didn’t care much for the company or their estimate, so we called an arborist to take a look at our trees . Thank goodness we did. Our giant, naked conifer wasn’t dead at all.

SHE WAS A DAWN REDWOOD…..A LIVING FOSSIL!

A NEW DAWN FOR THE DAWN REDWOOD

For millions of years, dawn redwoods grew across much of the Northern Hemisphere. Eventually they disappeared, leaving behind beautiful fossilized needles and cones.

In 1941, Japanese paleobotanist Shigeru Miki identified Metasequoia from fossils. As far as science knew, the tree had been extinct for millions of years.

Then, in the 1940s, living trees were discovered in a remote region of Sichuan Province, China. The fossil tree was alive. Water Fir (Shu shn) is the local Chinese name used by villagers who cut the trees for lumber and fed them to livestock without knowing science thought they were extinct.

Seeds were collected and sent to botanical institutions around the world, including Portland Oregon’s own Hoyt Arboretum. Hoyt planted its seeds in 1948, and in 1952 its dawn redwood produced cones—the first in the Western Hemisphere to do so in millions of years.

As an aside, our home was built in 1953, one year after the first cones at the Hoyt were produced

There is an even more wonderful local connection: fossilized Metasequoia needles and cones have been found right here in the Columbia River Gorge. These remarkable trees were part of Oregon’s landscape millions of years before finding their way back again.

AND THEN THERE IS OUR TREE

This is where the story begins to feel remarkably close to home.

Hoyt Arboretum sits in Portland’s Washington Park, only about two miles from our house, in the same beautiful stretch of parkland as the Portland Japanese Garden. And standing there today is one of those original dawn redwoods grown from the precious seeds that arrived from China in 1948. Then, just a couple of miles away, there is ours.

We don’t know exactly when she was planted or where her seedling came from, so we can’t claim a direct connection. But she is enormous—only slightly smaller than Hoyt’s original tree—and appears to be of a similar age. Could our dawn redwood somehow be connected to those first trees at Hoyt? We may never know.

But I love the possibility that sometime in those early years, when this newly rediscovered “fossil tree” was being propagated and shared, a little dawn redwood seedling made the short journey from Washington Park into our neighborhood and was planted at the corner of what would one day become our driveway. However she got here, we’re very glad she did.

Today, she towers above even our very large Douglas firs. In spring, soft new needles emerge in the brightest chartreuse green imaginable, almost glowing against the darker evergreens around her. Through summer they deepen to rich green, and in autumn the entire tree turns a beautiful ginkgo gold before dropping every needle for winter.

And there she stands again. A gigantic naked conifer. Looking, to anyone who doesn’t know better, very much like a tree that ought to come down. We certainly know better now.

HER NAME IS “MIKI” (mee-kee)

After all these years, it seemed our tree deserved a name. Miki could hardly be more fitting.

It honors Shigeru Miki, the Japanese paleobotanist who recognized Metasequoia in the fossil record. And wonderfully, the Japanese word miki (?) means beautiful tree or tree trunk. So Miki she is.

For decades, Miki has stood like a guardian at the entrance to our property, welcoming us home beneath her branches.

But she hasn’t watched over only us. Her great canopy has offered shade and shelter through countless Portland summers, while her branches and the world beneath them have provided refuge and homes for birds, squirrels, insects and all the other little creatures that have shared this patch of ground with us.

We’ve watched her burst into brilliant chartreuse each spring, shade us through summer, turn gold in autumn and stretch her bare branches into the winter sky. We’ve picked up her little fallen cones and marveled that fossils of cones much like them have been found in ancient Oregon stone.

Sometimes I still think about how close we came to losing her simply because someone looked at her and didn’t recognize what they were seeing.

She was here waiting when we arrived in 1998. She has watched over our home, our family and all the wild lives around us ever since. Somewhere along the way, she stopped being the unusual tree at the corner of our driveway.

She became Miki. Our friend .