Safe arbor for once lonely pines
By Amy Iggulden
London
May 12, 2005

Nature broadcaster Sir David Attenborough plants a Wollemi pine at Kew
Gardens in London.

A tree thought to have died out millions of years ago reappeared in public
in London on Tuesday and will be available as a patio pot plant next year.

The Wollemi pine, which grew alongside dinosaurs during the Jurassic period
200 million years ago, is thought to be the first endangered tree to be
protected through mass commercial cultivation.

Collectors will pay several thousand dollars for the first generation of 500
saplings, but amateur gardeners could pay less than £100 ($A240) for their
piece of prehistory, available at garden centres worldwide in April next
year.

Sally McGeogh, the project manager at Australia's Wollemi Pine
International, said humans were the trees' biggest threat in the wild.

"So as a way of ensuring the survival of the species, and paying for the
conservation program, we are making them available to anyone who wishes to
care for one," she said.

The tree became the most significant botanical discovery of the 20th century
when a cluster was found by a park ranger in the Blue Mountains, west of
Sydney, in 1994.

After a decade of trials it made its first European appearance at the Royal
Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Fewer than 100 of the trees survive in the bush and their whereabouts is
known to only a handful of people. The location of 15 of the 16 trees at Kew
is also being kept secret so that curious humans do not unwittingly pass on
disease or harm them.

Wollemis nobilis, a conifer of the Araucariaceae family, is described as an
"ideal patio plant" because it barely grows beyond a metre in pots, although
the sapling's 1000-year-old predecessor has reached 40 metres in the wild.

The head of the Kew arboretum, Tony Kirkham, said: "For botanists, finding
this tree is like a zoologist finding a living dinosaur, a Tyrannosaurus
rex."

- Telegraph