The Wollemi Pine was one of the major botanical discoveries of the twentieth century. Wollemi Pines may have emerged from the Araucariaceae family in the Cretaceous period. Fossils of pollen that look like they belong to Wollemia nobilis disappeared around two million years ago.¹ Botanists were therefore somewhat surprised when a living specimen was discovered in 1994.

It was discovered by David Noble, a Parks Officer in the Wollemi National Park in Australia, about 150km away from Sydney, when he abseiled into an unexplored sandstone gorge. At the bottom he found himself surrounded by trees he couldn't recognise. Puzzled, he took a sample back to Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney. They couldn't identify the plant either, so an expedition was sent out, led by Noble himself. This captured more details about the trees including its distinctive bark.² The plant was identified as a new species and named after the park it was found in and its discoverer. The shock of finding something so strange so close to a major city led said Jimmy Turner, Director of Horticultural Research at Dallas Arboretum, to say: "It’s the equivalent of finding a Tyrannosaurus rex in your back yard."

How to recognise a Wollemi Pine

Wollemi Pines are rare in the wild, with fewer than one hundred adult trees known, so most recognition is done in botanic gardens. The easiest way to recognise a Wollemi Pine is to visit Kew Gardens and look for a tree in a cage. Other ways to recognise it include buying one from a specialist retail and looking for the small tree in a pot marked Wollemi Pine. For the determined recogniser the tree has a few other distinctive features that vary with the age of the plant.

The young plant looks like a fern with long thin green leaves and a woody stem. As it ages the leaves fade in colour the bark changes from a nondescript brown to an extremely descript bubbly-brown, as though the bark is covered in Coco Pops. The tree grows tall and slender. It also coppices easily, meaning that many trunks can rise from the same stump. This makes it very difficult to tell how old any Wollemi Pine is, as counting the rings to the core does not give the age of the tree, merely of that particular shoot. The tree can reach heights of 35m in the wild.³

A mature tree will produce male and female cones⁴ at the ends of branches. The male cones are lower on the plant and are comparatively long and thin. The female cones are squatter and rounder in shape and are found on the branches at the top of the tree. The cones are wind pollinated in the spring (October-November in Australia) and take about 16-19 months to mature. The seed cones disintegrate, scattering the seed to produce new saplings, which usually die.⁵

The long-term past and short-term future of Wollemi Pines

Pinning down the exact origins of the Wollemi Pine is difficult. They are part of the Araucariaceae family, a family of trees that first appeared at the end of the Triassic era and went on to cover the planet. The range of Araucariaceae has shrunk since the end of the Cretaceous period, and now, with a few exceptions, they are only found in the Southern Hemisphere. The most famous of the Araucariaceae is the Monkey Puzzle Tree, (Araucaria araucana). Others include the Norfolk Pine (Araucaria heterophylla) and the Kauri (Agathis australis).

It's difficult to get an accurate date for when Wollemi Pines became a species in their own right. Recent research gives a date between 40 and 120 million years ago⁶ which means that while it's not exactly Jurassic bark, later dinosaurs could have munched on them. There are some early Cretaceous fossils that look like they could be Wollemia nobilis⁷ but they could simply be similar looking extinct trees. Using genetics to put together their past is difficult as it looks like they've been almost completely wiped out. Genetic testing of the trees has found it's impossible to distinguish between them,⁸ suggesting a recent bottleneck in the population. The spread of the Wollemi Pines is now limited to three regions in the Wollemi National Park in The Blue Mountains.

This limited distribution means the future may be bleak for the trees in the wild. They are susceptible to fungal infections,⁹ and one stand of trees may have been infected by tourists eager to see the trees in the wild before they become extinct.

The other danger is climate change. This has an immediate impact in making bushfires more common and more fierce. So far the stands of Wollemi Pines have survived in sheltered locations. A longer term problem is that rising temperatures may make life impossible in these locations.¹⁰ In theory the species could survive if new seedlings grew further up the mountains. However, this relies on the mountains rising higher than the temperature as there's a limit on how much up a mountain has.

Conservation efforts

There is not likely to be any on site eco-tourism as the stands are thought to be too vulnerable to fungal infection. The directive against visiting applies to scientific teams too. While there will be monitoring, the Recovery Plan aims to limit scientific visits as each fieldtrip has the potential to cause damage.¹¹

By itself this will not stop people from wanting to see the trees, so the conservation effort has worked to being the trees to visitors instead. Wollemi Pines are grown in Australia and around the world. They can be seen in locations as diverse as The Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, Dallas Arboretum, Texas and the Natural History Museum Garden, Paris.

To prevent the attention of collectors causing problems, it is also possible to purchase your own Wollemi Pine. Licensing commercial propagation is a way of funding conservation efforts of Wollemi Pines and other endangered species in Australia. This initiative creates the peculiar opportunity for anyone to host a lifeform that's rarer in the wild than a giant panda.

Additional Research by Willem U168712

Footnotes