This morning I spent half an hour poking around the Internet for clues to the identification of redwoods. This by way of a progress report.
It is easy enough to tell the three sorts of redwood apart by their leaves: giant redwood, coastal redwood and dawn redwood. With Wellingtonia being an alternate name for the first of these and there being a couple of quite decent dawn redwoods near the Tilt Yard Café at Hampton Court Palace. What I am not so sure about is telling giant redwoods, particularly juveniles which are not giant, from other trees more generally, other sorts of conifers.
I have been reminded that conifers are so named for having cones. An obvious fact which I had lost sight of.
The largest family of conifers is the pines, which includes cedars, firs, hemlocks, larches, pines and spruces. I think pines have distinctive needles.
Next up are the podocarps, mainly in the southern hemisphere.
The third and last large family, is the cypresses (the Cupressaceae). A family with a complicated looking taxonomic hierarchy which includes the small sub-family, the sequoia (the Sequoioideae). Lots of common or garden cypresses are in the large cypress sub-family (the Cupressoideae) or in the cypress genus (the Cupressus). Including the ubiquitous Leylandii, named for a Liverpool banker. See reference 2.
All the subject of ongoing and lively debate among conifer taxonomists, who, if they are not into genes are often into cones. But I think I am making progress.
Reference 1: https://herbaria.plants.ox.ac.uk/bol/conifers/. The source of the snap above.
Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leyland_cypress.
Reference 3: La Classification phylogénétique du vivant - Guillaume Lecointre et Hervé Le Guyader, illustrated by Dominique Visset - 2001. For the bigger picture. My version being in English from Balknap, translated by Karen McCoy. A very well produced book, as befits a serious university. Seemingly last noticed at reference 4.
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