I discovered the Dawn Redwoods the old-fashioned way: by walking a new path.
I’d been climbing my favorite tree in Harvard Yard, the Emerson Tree, looking out over the crisscrossing pathways in the yard between Sever and the gate facing the Art Museums. I wanted to walk towards the Littauer Tree near the Science Center, so I climbed down from my perch. Crossing the grass, in the exact direction of my longing, I intersected various social paths beaten by the ghosts of cows and students. To beat a less-trodden path is an individualizing act. These paths of desire collide with the world at a diagonal; what is encountered is always a new world.
Diagonally, I stumbled upon a grove of trees in a quiet corner of the Yard, between Robinson Hall, Memorial Church, and Canaday. Somehow, in all my years of climbing trees around Harvard, I had never truly noticed this grove. Looking around, I realized that not one, not two, but all five of these funky, flaky, light-reddish trees were eminently climbable. Easily grabbable branches lingered low on all of them, and these horizontal branches proceeded consistently towards the top in intervals never taller than myself.
Choosing the tree closest to Robinson, I swung myself in and lost myself climbing, following an instinctive flow of hands and feet upwards. Before I knew it, I was near eye-level with the roof of Robinson. The views of Memorial Hall, Memorial Church, and Tercentenary Theater were incredible. I could see a sliver of Emerson across the Sever yard; I started thinking of overlapping limbs. There’s an Emerson Tree, and there’s a Robinson Tree. Philosophy and history, both trees. Trees of trees. The branching progress of ideas is a tree, a dialogue over time that develops organically. The diverging facts of the world’s progress, and our evolving stories about this progress—these too are trees. They share a single trunk of trunks with us. Our roots go all the way down.
The cold November wind, which had been strong as I climbed, blew harder and harder the higher I went. A strong gust blew, and the tree began wobbling like a flicked door-stopper. I held on tight with all four limbs, my torso wrapped around the trunk koala-style. The tree swayed in slow motion, but I was sure of its strength and elasticity. I felt exhilarated, waving as one with the tree and the wind.
John Muir, one of America’s greatest nature writers, once described a similar experience atop a Douglas spruce during a winter windstorm in the Sierras. Swinging around, high off the ground, he too felt “no recognition of danger by any tree; no deprecation; but rather an invincible gladness as remote from exultation as from fear.” Swaying in the wind, I felt rooted in the same faith as Muir, a faith in the strength of the Earth, the faith that a branch has in its trunk.
So there I was, on the edge of the tree of history, blowing around in the wind of the present.
Since that day, I’ve been visiting this grove of trees often, climbing each in turn, or just sitting underneath them to read To the Lighthouse, as I imagine other Harvard students have and will for many generations. In Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece, she slightly rewrites a line from a poem called “Luriana Lurilee:” “And all the lives we ever lived / And all the lives to be / Are full of trees and changing leaves.” In the original poem, published after the author’s death, it says “full of trees and waving leaves.” Woolf branches waving into changing, taking a ghost in a new direction. Relatedly, Muir describes trees as travelers just like us: “our own little journeys, away and back again, are only little more than tree wavings—many of them not so much.”
Turns out, these particular trees have a fascinating history. They’re metasequoia, known colloquially as dawn redwoods. They are the only living branches of the redwood family besides sequoia sempervirens and sequoia gigantea.
Sempervirens are the coast redwoods of Northern California and Southern Oregon, the tallest trees on earth, who suck the fog right out of the cool Pacific air. This summer, I spent weeks pursuing a mission to touch the single tallest tree in the world, a mission I completed barefoot, wading up a forbidden creek illegally. Gigantea are the giant sequoias of the western slopes of the Sierras, the largest trees on earth, who adapted to frequent wildfires. I remember waiting for the tourists to finish their pictures and clear out so I could hop a fence, run to the largest tree in the world, and wrap my arms around it.
But metasequoia are far older than their famous cousins in California. Metasequoia flourished across the northern hemisphere during the Cretaceous period, the time of tyrannosaurs. They stretched from Asia to the northern islands of Canada. Only known by fossils, these ancestral sequoias were long thought to be extinct, until living specimens were discovered in China during the 1940s. Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum funded an expedition of Chinese collectors to gather seeds, which were soon sent all over the world. Some were planted here, next to the history building. These ‘living fossils’ were widely lauded as one of the greatest discoveries in 20th-century botany.
The living fossils carry living seeds. It turns out that they grow quite well in this cold climate, and this is the perfect time of year to collect metasequoia seedpods if you’d like to grow them yourself. The giant sequoia seedpods, like the one tattooed on my ankle, only open when they feel fire; they’re pyrophytes. They belong in the dry west. But their metasequoia predecessor has flourished here in the wet east, creating what is probably the best grove of climbable trees anywhere at Harvard. It’s surprising, what of the Old World will take root in the New. So much of the story of America is this story of various Wests folding themselves back upon the East, making themselves at home in the changing garden.
As I’ve returned to the dawn redwoods, their green needly leaves have oranged. They’re deciduous, unlike their cousins. They remind me of British Columbia’s larches, but darker. It’s interesting how the metasequoia’s outsides change, while their basic organic structure has remained practically static across the millions of years that the ancestors of California’s sequoias spent evolving. They aren’t just living fossils; they’re evolutionary ghosts, frozen adaptations to a former time.
Late one night, after returning from Thanksgiving, I walked from the Science Center Plaza into the yard through the Meyer Gate. Next to the gate is an inscription from one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journals, written after a “College Jubillee” in the Yard: “Cambridge at any time is full of ghosts; but on that day the anointed eye saw the crowd of spirits that mingled with the procession in the vacant spaces, year by year, as the classes proceeded; and then the far longer train of ghosts…the long winding train reaching back into eternity.” I walked through the gates, past Canaday, and made my way to the Robinson Tree. I climbed it in the bright dark. At a high perch, I sat in silence wrapped around the still tree. This time, there was no wind. I saw not a single living soul anywhere in the Yard. In the emptiness, I could feel the echoes of Harvard’s ghosts.
Imagine seeing Harvard across time and space. Ghosts fill Tercentenary Theater and commence in all directions. They gather in the church and disperse through the library stacks. Ghosts anastomose like the silhouettes of a tree-branch canopy net while the sun sets. Snail trails of evolution, snail trails of cumulative culture, snail trails of the self slither across Harvard Yard. And at the end of all these ghostly paths, my warm breath fogged in the still night air at the final hour of this November.
Harvard Yard is a palimpsest of history. Overlapping layers of trees, buildings, and people have come and gone, leaving their beaten paths for us to follow and stray from. All these ghostly paths of the past are like metasequoia of the self; they are living fossils, ancestors whose presence reminds us that we are not alone. Historians, like those names adorning Robinson Hall, made it their lives’ work to collect and crystallize the ghosts of the past so that we can live a fuller present. Our stories descended in spirit from these thick ghosts—we are their waking dream. Now, every possible path branches from us. One day our own ghosts will fiber the living. I hope we leave good paths to follow; I hope future Harvard students climb these trees even higher, overlapping my own vertical ghost. I hope our seeds grow as long and as large as giant sequoias.
Aidan Fitzsimons ’25 (aidan_fitzsimons@college.harvard.edu) romanticizes a new plant once or twice a year.