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Ancient Trees at The Cove
Amongst the young trees planted at The Cove there is a collection that brings together six of the world's most remarkable "living fossil" trees — species whose lineages stretch back tens or even hundreds of millions of years, long predating the flowering plants, grasslands, and mammals we now take for granted. The Chile pine and Wollemi Pine both belong to an ancient conifer family that dominated Gondwanan forests in the age of dinosaurs. Ginkgo is the sole survivor of an entire order of plants once found worldwide, thought extinct in the wild until living trees were found in cultivation in China and Japan. The giant sequoia and coast redwood, both relatives in the cypress family, once spanned much of the Northern Hemisphere before retreating to narrow refuges in California. And the dawn redwood — the most recently established of the six lineages, geologically speaking — was known only from fossils until a living population was discovered in a remote Chinese valley in 1944. Growing them together is a small way of keeping a connection to deep time alive in the present.
Listed below roughly oldest to youngest by fossil record.
Chile Pine / Monkey Puzzle (Araucaria araucana)
Ancient origins
Part of the ancient Araucariaceae family, with a fossil record stretching back over 200 million years to the Triassic, when relatives grew across Gondwana and were browsed by sauropods. Its spiky, overlapping leaves are thought to be a defence evolved against browsing by large herbivores long since extinct.
Recent history of discovery
The species survived in isolated volcanic highlands of Chile and Argentina, central to the culture of the Pehuenche people ("people of the araucaria"), who relied on its edible seeds. Naturalist Archibald Menzies brought seeds to Britain in 1795, reputedly pocketing them from his own dinner plate. The English name "monkey puzzle" comes from an 1850s Cornish remark that its branches would puzzle even a climbing monkey — in a county with no monkeys at all.
Wollemi Pine (Wollemia nobilis)
Ancient origins
Also in the Araucariaceae family, which dominated forests in the age of dinosaurs. Fossil pollen and foliage attributed to Wollemia date back some 90–100 million years, when the genus was widespread across Gondwana before nearly vanishing entirely.
Recent history of discovery
One of the most dramatic botanical finds of modern times: in 1994, park ranger David Noble discovered a small stand of unfamiliar trees while canyoning in a remote gorge in Wollemi National Park, Australia. It matched no known living genus — a tree known only from fossils, alive in a hidden rainforest pocket. Fewer than 100 mature wild trees are known, at a location still kept secret to protect them.
Ginkgo biloba — The Maidenhair Tree
Ancient origins
Ginkgo is the last living member of an entire order, Ginkgoales, that once flourished worldwide. Fossil leaves nearly identical to today's fan-shaped foliage date back roughly 200 million years to the early Jurassic — ginkgo trees would have been familiar to many dinosaurs. The lineage predates flowering plants and has no close living relatives.
Recent history of discovery
By the time Western botanists encountered it, ginkgo survived mainly in cultivation around Chinese and Japanese temples. German naturalist Engelbert Kaempfer documented it in Japan in the late 1600s, bringing back the first European account and seeds. Genuinely wild populations weren't confirmed in remote China until the 20th century, and it's still debated whether any truly wild stands remain.
Giant Redwood / Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum)
Ancient origins
A member of the cypress family (Cupressaceae), related to both the coast redwood and dawn redwood. Fossil relatives place ancestral sequoia-like conifers across the Northern Hemisphere as far back as the Jurassic, with the genus itself well established by the Cretaceous. Ice ages and climate shifts eventually confined it to a narrow band of the Sierra Nevada, where it now grows as the most massive tree species on Earth by volume.
Recent history of discovery
Indigenous peoples of the Sierra Nevada had long known the groves, but the trees weren't reported to the wider world until the 1850s, when accounts (and a certain amount of showmanship, including bark stripped and shipped for exhibition) caused a sensation in the US and Europe. Early Victorian botanists briefly and controversially named it after the Duke of Wellington (Wellingtonia), a naming dispute not fully settled until the modern genus Sequoiadendron was established in 1939.
Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens)
Ancient origins
The tallest tree species on Earth, and another Cupressaceae relative of the giant sequoia. Fossils attributed to Sequoia-like conifers date back over 100 million years, with the genus once widespread across the Northern Hemisphere, including areas now far too cold or dry to support it — remnants have even been found in Arctic fossil beds from warmer epochs. Today it survives in a narrow fog-belt strip along the coast of California and southern Oregon, the moisture of which it depends on heavily.
Recent history of discovery
Long known and used by coastal Indigenous peoples, coast redwoods drew intense commercial logging interest from the mid-1800s onward, which felled the majority of old-growth stands within a century. This spurred one of America's early major conservation movements: the Save the Redwoods League, founded in 1918, worked to preserve remaining groves, eventually leading to the creation of Redwood National and State Parks in 1968 — home to some of the tallest known living trees, including specimens only definitively measured and confirmed in recent decades using laser rangefinding and climbing surveys.
Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides)
Ancient origins
Metasequoia was described from fossils before any living tree was known — Japanese paleobotanist Shigeru Miki named the genus in 1941. Fossils show it once ranged across the Northern Hemisphere, including the Arctic, during warmer periods tens of millions of years ago. Unusually for a conifer, it's deciduous, shedding its needles each autumn.
Recent history of discovery
In 1944 a small living population was found in a remote Sichuan valley by a Chinese forester. Word reached Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, and a 1948 seed-collecting expedition distributed material worldwide. Nearly every dawn redwood outside China today descends from that single seed collection.
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