The three redwoods, compared

Among the Redwoods covers three distinct trees that share a common name and little else. Two are Californian evergreens of enormous size; the third is a deciduous tree from central China that was thought extinct until the 1940s. Learning what separates them helps you read labels, compare records, and avoid treating every "redwood" as the same thing.

Side by side

	Giant sequoia	Coast redwood	Dawn redwood
Latin name	Sequoiadendron giganteum	Sequoia sempervirens	Metasequoia glyptostroboides
Native range	Sierra Nevada, California	Coastal fog belt, California and Oregon	Central China (Hubei and Sichuan)
Leaves	Evergreen	Evergreen	Deciduous — sheds in autumn
Habit	Massive, broad, columnar	Tall, straight, narrow-crowned	Slender, neatly conical
Tallest known	~95 m in its native range	~116 m — the tallest tree on Earth	~50 m
Bark	Thick, soft, spongy, cinnamon-red	Fibrous, fissured, red-brown	Fibrous, orange-brown, deeply fluted
Foliage	Short awl-like scales on rope-like shoots	Flat two-ranked sprays of needles	Soft feathery needles in opposite pairs
Cones	Egg-shaped, 5–8 cm, woody	Small, 2–3 cm	Small, rounded, on long stalks
In Britain	The Victorian giants planted from the 1850s	Tall estate and glen specimens	Young trees grown from 1948 seed

Telling them apart

The fastest field test is the season. If the tree is bare in winter or in fresh foxy-pink growth in spring, it is a dawn redwood — the only deciduous one of the three.

For the two evergreens, look at the foliage and the trunk. Giant sequoia has hard, prickly, awl-shaped leaves pressed to rope-like shoots, a trunk that swells dramatically at the base, and bark so thick and soft you can press a fist into it. Coast redwood has flat sprays of yew-like needles arranged in two ranks along the shoot, a straighter and narrower trunk, and often a crowd of sprouts around its base — it readily regrows from the stump, which the other two do not.

Where the two Californian species are easily confused, the foliage settles it: scales hugging the shoot mean giant sequoia; flat combed-out needles mean coast redwood.

Why the distinction matters

A record is only as good as its identification. A "redwood" logged without saying which one tells you little about how the tree will look, how fast it grew, or what its presence in a place means. Where a record names a species, we keep the evidence behind it; where it does not, we say so. See The dawn redwood: a living fossil for the strangest of the three, and History in Britain for how the Californian giants arrived. If you can confirm or correct a species on a record, tell us.