In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Australia, on the trail of the lonesome pine…. To the North Western edge of Sydney there is a bluish haze, one million hectares of forest that makes up Wollemi National Park. In September 1994 park ranger David Noble was out ranging, for want of a better word, and he came across a tree he had never seen before. He took a sample and waved it at anyone who was prepared to be waved at. Nothing. It accidentally got waved at a paleobotanist who pronounced it The Pinosaur, believed to date back to the Triassic/Jurassic Period some 200-280 million years ago, considered to have become extinct some 2 million years ago. So began one of the most interesting and important conservation projects ever.
Imagine lowering yourself into a deep gully and discovering a Velociraptor, that is essentially the deal here, just less bitey. In one tiny gully in a remote area of the globe a small stand of trees was discovered on the edge of extinction, one bad rainstorm could have and probably would have tipped the Jurassic Bark over to the dead species club, inhabited by 99% of all species ever known to have existed.
The initial assumption that it shared certain characteristics with the 200 million year old family Araucariaceae was eventually proved correct. The Wollemi has since been placed into a new genus along with Agathis and Araucaria. It is the long lost cousin of the Monkey Puzzle tree, the Chilean pine, Latin name Araucaria araucana, named after the country’s Indians in the 1830s. When the ancient supercontinent Pangea broke up in the Mesozoic era (Jurassic/Triassic) around 175 million years ago, what would have been the common ancestor of the Monkey Puzzle and the Wollemi diverged. The cousin that headed West evolved into the Monkey Puzzle tree, a native on the land mass now recognised as South America. The cousin that headed East now resides on the lump of Pangea better known as Australia, it was thought lost and gone forever, oh my darling Clementine. Now consider the geological slowness of time in that the continents move at the rate a finger nail grows.
Survival of the fittest? It is a testament to the fitness of the Wollemi pine that it has survived at all, this tree is remarkably adaptable and fits into a huge climatic range. Despite being discovered in Australia’s temperate-subtropical North West, it is proving to be adaptable to cold and wet. It tolerates temperatures between −5 and 60 °C (23 and 140 °F), with reports from Japan and the USA that the Wollemi can survive down to −12 °C (10 °F). A grove of Wollemi pines planted in Inverewe Garden, Scotland, believed to be the most northerly location of any successful planting, have survived temperatures of −7 °C (19 °F), recorded in January 2010. I would also mention that my Wollemi has suffered a one off dip of −20 °C with no damage. In short, unlike the Picky Panda, this tree deserves to live.
The Wollemi can tolerate both full sun and full shade, and whilst the Wollemi National Park has thin acidic well drained soil, mine is growing in gooey sticky alkaline clay. Sadly it is susceptible to Phytophthora cinnamomi, a fatal mold infection. It is for this reason that the location of the Wollemi in Australia is a closely guarded secret. To harm the Wollemi is punishable with a fine of up to $220,000 or two years’ imprisonment.
Fewer than a hundred Wollemi’s are known to be growing wild, however it is difficult to count individuals, as most are multistemmed and may have a connected root system not totally dissimilar to the Yew . Genetic tests have determined that all the Wollemi specimens are genetically indistinguishable, inferring that the species has been through a genetic bottleneck in which its population became so low (possibly just one or two trees) that all genetic variability was lost, a bit like humans and bananas. One of the first visitors to the site said the pines gave the impression of sheltering in that canyon, as if they had travelled far to escape. Like a tiny little band of Lord of the Rings tree Ents, who had retreated to an ever smaller niche as Australia dried out. I’m not joking about humans and bananas being on the same evolutionary knife edge as the Wollemi. I believe Douglas Adams best explains the precariousness nature of our existence in the universe and the ignorance that most of us choose to adopt:
“Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise.”
It is worth pointing out that another method of determining how fit an organism is in the environment in which it finds itself is how much it evolves (changes) over time. Both the Monkey Puzzle and the Wollemi have changed very little in the past 65 million years. This is why both have been described as living fossils, its genetic make-up has remained virtually unchanged for millions of years. This is why, along with ferns, they are a little over used in the film adaptation of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, Isla Nubla would indeed have been crawling with Velociraptors and Monkey Puzzle trees, just not in the goddamn kitchen as Hollywood portrays.
Intriguingly it has recently been suggested by Chris Page, a British expert on the family Araucariaceae, that the Monkey Puzzle reminds us of Dinosaurs for a good reason, they evolved to look like them as a means of scaring away big stupid herbivores. Certainly if you look at the base of the trunk it does resemble the foot of a large animal, almost elephantine in its chunkiness. Chris Page dubbed them Palaeo-pseudoscarecrows in that they may have given herbivores who are big on girth small on brain the impression that carnivores were lurking in the forest. “Dinosaurs may be extinct but has anyone told the Araucarians?” was the question he posed.
I was first introduced to the Money Puzzle tree in 1980. I was 10 years old and was taken by my Mother and Grandmother to the National Trust garden at Stourhead in Wiltshire. A magical place created in the 19th Century with a central (artificial) lake fed by the river Stour (real). Circling this lake is a path punctuated with “ancient” Greek and Roman style temples, grottos and follies to draw the curious walker ever onwards. This was the best garden I had ever seen, and the best tree I had ever seen. I decided at that moment that I was going to have a garden when I’m older, with a Monkey Puzzle tree.
In 1998 I realised this dream, but by then I had another, I desperately needed to acquire a Wollemi pine. I had been following the story of the Coca Pops tree since its discovery in 1994. It has been dubbed the Coca Pops tree on account of the bizarre bubbly bark that develops in juveniles. It had been decided in 1998 that the best way to protect the trees from plant hunters was to get them on sale as soon as possible.
I therefore near wetted myself when a story in New Scientist (22 October 2005) advised on the impending sale of the lonesome pine. 292 potted Wollemi trees were going up for auction at Sotheby’s in Sydney. These raised hundreds of thousands which was ploughed back into the conservation effort. Kew Gardens had already received 15 plants in order to determine how they would cope with the UK’s famously wet, cold and dark winters.
On March 26th 2006 (my birthday!) the Independent ran an article to announce that Kernock Garden center had been granted the license to cultivate in the UK. £97 a tree! I dug out my finest stationary and sent my Grandmother a long letter and a copy of the article. Well, it was her fault, she took me to Stourhead which started the need for me to collect living fossils. I lamented over the fact that it was the most amazing story of survival against the odds, and how this tree deserved a chance to flourish once again. My Grandmother, Kerstin Cross (neé Afzelius) was the Swedish daughter of two very keen botanists. She was therefore delighted by my story and her response duly turned up with a cheque to soften the cost when my name went on the waiting list. I am pleased to announce that my Wollemi is very happy, and I believe I had the first tree to have fruited in the UK outside of Kew. If you are interested to read further on the remarkable discovery of this tree and the detective story which unfolded then I highly recommend the book by James Woodford “The Wollemi Pine”.
