The Redwood in the Parking Lot

One of the planet’s most glamorous trees is moonlighting as office landscaping. Was it trucked in like a diva on tour, or has it simply been holding court longer than the building?

Picture it. A rainy Thursday, a business park built to be forgotten, a parking lot in tidy gray, and then, rising out of a strip of lawn like a red-carpet arrival nobody invited, a redwood. Its trunk is wider than a café table. Its bark is cinnamon on top and storm-dark below. Its roots spill over the curb like a cat that refuses to stay in its bed. Our editorial desk was asked the obvious question: did the streets grow up around the tree, or did somebody hire a crane and bring the tree to the streets? Let’s get to the root of it.

Planted small, grew up on the job

Sorry, conspiracy fans. A tree like this almost certainly arrived as a modest nursery sapling when the lot was landscaped, then did what redwoods do best: grew fast and never stopped. That flared, buttressed base with roots running across the soil is the signature of a tree that has anchored itself in one spot for decades. Trees delivered in a box don’t look like that.

Then there’s the engineering, and it is where the transplant theory runs out of road. One of Australia’s larger tree movers, Established Tree Transplanters, runs a fleet of hydraulic tree spades. Its biggest machine maxes out at trees about 15 metres (roughly 49 feet) tall, with a trunk about 400 millimetres (roughly 16 inches) across and a weight of up to six tonnes.¹² Our parking-lot giant is easily twice that width. Anything bigger means hand-digging and a crane. Western Australia’s conservation department once documented a single tree weighing 37 tonnes, dug out by hand and craned into the sky.¹³ It can be done. It’s just not how anyone decorates a visitor-parking island.

Coast or dawn? A redwood identity parade

“Redwood” is a family name shared by three species, and two of them love a corporate address. Here’s how to tell the cousins apart:

The easiest test costs nothing: come back in January. Bare branches mean dawn redwood. Still green means coast redwood. Either way, you’re looking at royalty.

The tree that ghosted the fossil record

If it’s a dawn redwood, settle in, because it has the best comeback story in botany. In 1941 the Japanese botanist Shigeru Miki named Metasequoia from fossils and assumed the tree was long gone. Two years later, Chinese foresters collected specimens from a mysterious living tree in a Hubei village then called Modaoxi. In 1948, researchers confirmed it: Metasequoia, very much alive.¹⁷ The forester who first collected it, Wang Zhan, stumbled on the tree in 1943 while travelling to survey the forests of Shennongjia. He told the whole story on audio tape in 1986, and it was finally published as a posthumous paper in 2025.¹⁶

Then the seeds went global. A seedling and seeds reached Japan in 1949 as a gift to the imperial household, and by 1953 about 400 of them had been planted in a single forest.¹⁷ Every dawn redwood in a parking lot today is a descendant of that wartime discovery. Not bad for a tree that was supposed to be extinct.

Born in a greenhouse, raised on a bench

No, nobody is digging up wild forests to decorate office parks. Landscape redwoods come from nurseries, and coast redwoods are often cloned rather than grown from seed. The reason is a little embarrassing for such a grand tree: it makes loads of seed, but very little of it sprouts. Spain’s Lourizán Forest Research Centre, run by the Galician regional government, keeps a living gene bank of coast redwoods and clones them from cuttings.¹⁰ Its published method reads like a spa menu for twigs:

In one Lourizán trial, 64 percent of 125 cuttings rooted and became proper little trees.¹⁰ From there, a commercial redwood climbs the container ladder: pot, bigger pot, wooden box. Then a developer places an order, a flatbed rolls up, and a small crew tucks it into a curbed island with a sprinkler line. Ta-da: your parking-lot giant’s origin story.

Proof that planted redwoods get huge, fast

If a nursery twig turning into a skyscraper sounds far-fetched, look abroad.

In Rotorua, New Zealand, the government planted coast redwoods at Whakarewarewa Forest in 1901.¹ The planting crews came from prison camps, and by 1926, when the trees were just 22 years old, they had left the European larch planted beside them looking skinny and frankly embarrassed.³ Scion, New Zealand’s Crown forestry research institute, says the species keeps growing hard for centuries and has no major insect or disease problems.⁴ The country’s redwood plantings had spread to roughly 10,000 hectares by 2018.⁵

Spain has its own glamorous accident. Around 1940, foresters in Cantabria planted coast redwoods on Monte Cabezón, hoping to grow home-grown industrial timber.⁶ By the time the trees matured, nobody needed the wood, so all 848 of them, on about 2.5 hectares, were left standing and in 2003 crowned a protected natural monument.⁷ Two of the world’s most admired redwood forests outside America began exactly like the tree in the business park: as humble planted saplings.

And when a big tree truly has to move

For the rare occasions a mature tree must relocate, South Australia’s Department for Infrastructure and Transport publishes a government rulebook for the job.¹¹ Think of it as the redwood’s private moving service:

How to find your tree’s real birthday

You don’t need a chainsaw to date a redwood. Scroll back through historical aerial photos in online map tools and watch the canopy appear. Ask the property manager for the original landscape plans. Check the local planning department’s site permits. You may discover your “ancient” giant is younger than the lobby carpet, and still taller than everything in sight.

A small ambassador for an endangered dynasty

The coast redwood is listed as Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), largely because historic logging shrank its old forests.¹⁴ Only about 5 percent of the original old-growth coast redwood forest remains intact.¹⁵ A redwood in a business park will never replace an old-growth grove. But it is a working ambassador for one, and it deserves better than compacted soil and a careless weed whacker. Give it mulch, give it room, and please stop parking on its toes.

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