toward a critique of sustainable architecture and landscape || the wollemi pine: from dinosaur to...

The Wollemi Pine: From Dinosaur To Patio IconAuthor(s): Julie RoseSource: Log, No. 8, Toward a critique of sustainable architecture and landscape (Summer 2006),pp. 88-98Published by: Anyone CorporationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41765593 .

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A Wollemi up for auction. Sketch: Julie Rose.



Julie Rose The Wollemi Pine:

From Dinosaur

To Patio Icon

Serendipity marked the white man's discovery of the Wollemi Pine from the first. I tell the story of this geographical acci- dent again now not only because such a recital has become routine when mention of the lovely Wollemi is made but also because it contains the seeds, as it were, of the future of the tree ever after, from collection and classification to the industrial-scale program of cultivation, conservation, and commercialization that culminated, last year, in a major Sotheby's auction in Sydney and, this year, in a truly astound-

ing commercial release with global reach harnessing all the tools of supercapitalist marketing and entertainment hoopla - worlds away from the state of the pine in the wild.

This is the story in a nutshell. On September 10, 1994-, a

young man named David Noble spotted a species of tree he didn't recognize in a deep, narrow sandstone canyon he was

overflying as an officer with the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service. Noble promptly abseiled down into the canyon for a closer look.

He found there a grove of tall pine trees unknown to him, in fact, unknown anywhere in the world as a living species, though Noble didn't know that then. Several mature trees were up to 100 feet tall; they had multiple trunks, some as many as 20 coppices, knobby chocolate-brown bark, male and female cones, and beautiful blue-green needles pairing in double rows along frondlike branches that ended in tufts or the odd, white waxy ball.

Noble collected seeds and clippings and took them to his

colleagues in Sydney, Wyn Jones and Jan Allen, to aid in the identification process. The tree was not totally unknown; it was on the pre-Jurassic fossil record. Only this particular tree had not been seen since, not by white man at least, in the 200 years since white settlement of Australia, and it was

thought to have become extinct. The earliest fossil dates back 90 million years, though the family that the fossils are

grouped under, Araucariaceae , which includes the Norfolk Island, Kauri, Hoop, and Monkey pines, goes back at least

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A CUTTING FROM A LIVING WOLLEMI Pine lies atop an ancient fossil OF ITS species.

200 million years, to a time not so long, in geological terms, after the comet strike 250 million years ago that is now

thought to have sundered the Australian continent from the

major land mass of Gondwanaland, thereby fostering species of flora and fauna unknown in other parts of the world.

The nobility of the trees and their unprecedented vintage were immediately a source of wonder for scientist and

layperson alike, here and around the globe. The gentleman- naturalist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough came up with the perfect understatement: "How marvelous and excit-

ing that we should have discovered this rare survivor from such an ancient past." Closer to home, Professor Carrick

Chambers, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, put some spin on it: "This is the equivalent of finding a small dinosaur alive on Earth." Even if the tree predates the dinosaurs and is anything but scary, Carrick accurately ex-

pressed something of the awe felt in the way that geological time suddenly opened up before us, as if scripted by Hollywood. Everyone was floored by the vastness of time and the unpredictable, unfathomable, and elusive grandeur of nature. There was nothing anyone could do about time, but nature was another matter. Science swiftly stepped in.

Science begins with naming, and before long, Allen and

Jones had come up with a name peculiarly apt: Wollemia nobilis ; nobilis after Noble, and Wollemia from wollemi, the

aboriginal term already used for both the national park in which the trees grow and the creek that runs through it, and which derives from mollumi , meaning watch out, look around you. Tall and skinny, like the ghost gums that popu- late many sandstone gorges throughout the coastal rain for-

est, the Wollemi stand like noble sentinels, towering over all

else, keeping watch.

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Listed in 1 979 and covering almost half a million hectares, with the biggest wilderness area in the state, the Wollemi National Park, which shelters the 90 mature Wollemi Pines now catalogued, lies 100-150 kilometers northwest of Sydney. It is a particularly rugged, virgin out- reach of the Blue Mountains, Sydney's spectacular "play- ground" and part of the Great Dividing Range that runs

along the eastern side of the Australian continent. The Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area was designated in 2000, some 10 years after the Great Western Highway was enhanced by a long segment of freeway and various incre- mental additions, making the Upper Mountains roughly an hour-and-a-half drive from the city for the ever-increasing numbers of people who wish to frolic in what has become a sacred site for tourism and clean living, and where in wilderness just off the beaten track it is still possible to feel

you are the only person on earth. The site where the Wollemis have lived undisturbed is

well beyond the reach of the Blue Mountain villages that host things like Yulefest in July, when the mountains are at their coldest, and the Rhododendron Festival every Novem- ber, in late spring. There are no five-star hotels or coaches full of tourists anywhere to be seen. It is actually much closer to Newcastle, the coastal city north of Sydney that is the center of a fossil deposit of another kind: coal, that high- pollutant, global-warming fossil fuel that abounds in seams all through the Hunter Valley, which Newcastle dominates.

While it is said that a new species of plant is discovered

every week (proving how little we know of the planet) thus

balancing out the species that is lost every week to extinction

(proving how little we care for it), only one other find

remotely matching the enormity of the Wollemi discovery is on the books. This is the Dawn Redwood, found in a village in Szechuan, China, though only correctly identified as a

"living fossil" in 194-1, when botanists Zhan Wang, Xiznsu Hu, and Wan-Chun Cheng connected the dots tracing it back to a species thought to have died out five million years ago, and which they subsequently classified as part of a new

genus, Metascjuoia. With the Wollemi only just discovered 12 years ago, so

close to urban centers, how many other unknown species might there be, perhaps close by in other inaccessible recesses of the Wollemi bush? Certainly the tribal aborigines who roamed these parts for millennia before white settlement would have known. One of the major subsequent discoveries in the national park triggered by the Wollemi find is a rock

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shelter with over 200 rock art drawings of ancestral beings and stencils of hands and tools, all in pristine condition. The shelter has been named Malyangu, meaning place of the

Wedge-Tailed Eagle. Before the Wollemi Pine was dragged out of the mists of

time, the only plant life that truly mattered in the economic life of the Hunter Valley was the grapevine. Now interna-

tionally famous for its vineyards, it has been producing wine since the Francophile viticulturist James Busby launched the wine industry there in 1824. But annual droughts attenuated

by global warming and the serious glut of Australian wines now on the local and international markets have conspired with the dinosaur of the coal mining industry, which one

might well have thought was on the way to extinction, to turn the tide back to coal mining as the Hunter's most valu- able trade. Two-hundred-twenty square kilometers, one-sixth of the Upper Hunter's floor, is now covered with open- cut mines - one big, ugly environmental footprint. According to Geoff Evans of the Mineral Policy Institute, Newcastle now

exports the largest tonnage of black coal of any port in the world. Coal is, in fact, Australia's biggest export commodity - and nearly 50 percent of it is mined in the Hunter Valley and exported through Newcastle. Black coal exports make

up 90 percent of the Hunter region's export income. At any time of the year, Evans says, up to 30 bulk loader ships sit about one kilometer off Newcastle's beautiful surf beaches

waiting to load up the coal and take it away, mainly to Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.

Against this background, the beauty of the Wollemi Pine

project y as well as its more troubling aspects as a supercapitalist response to nature, can best be appreciated. The project began virtually the day the pine was discovered, when the Wollemi Pine Recovery Team was set up with a charter to

develop and manage a recovery plan "to ensure the ongoing viability of the Wollemi Pine in the wild."1 With only 90 mature trees in existence - the oldest, known as The Bill Tree, is thought to be at least 1,000 years old - and with no idea at first whether the pine could be cultivated ex situ , protection was of paramount importance.

The project has marshaled seemingly limitless scientific

expertise as it has expanded to off- site cultivation to ensure

preservation. Scientists have been enlisted from the fields of classification, tree architecture, molecular phylogeny, fossil studies, population genetics, ecology, tree aging, wood

anatomy, reproductive study, pollen study, leaf anatomy, bud

anatomy and branch attachment, steaming volatile oil in

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1. The team consists of members of the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service and the Botanic Gardens Trust (Sydney), who act as modern-day site custodians, suited head to toe in anticontamination labwear to protect the site from germs from the outside world, making the wilderness a sort of reverse laboratory.



leaves, seed germination and storage, horticulture, cytologi- cal study, embryology, somatic embryogenesis, tissue culture, micro-organisms and pathology, and flammability and ento-

mology (to list those categories mentioned in the Sotheby's First Generation Wollemi Pines : Collector's Edition catalogue).

Collection and curation enlisted people working on seed collection, cuttings collection, initial propagation and estab- lishment of a representative off-site population, and curation

proper. Propagation has gone hand in hand with propaganda of the nicest kind, handled by a manifestly successful "edu- cation and community awareness program" and photogra- phy. The spectacular images we have seen of the Wollemis, largely online, are official photographs taken by members of the scientific teams and aimed at satisfying the armchair

explorer in all of us, thereby ensuring we won't violate the off-limits, "sacred" wilderness sites.

Nothing like the Wollemi propagation program has ever been seen. While the recovery team was looking after the

parent trees in the wild, a group of savvy, brand-conscious horticulturalists and conservationists in global-capitalist mode formed Wollemi Australia Pty. Ltd., a joint venture between the Queensland Government Department of

Primary Industries (DPI) Forestry and Birkdale Nursery, an established ornamental horticultural company also in Queensland, to begin growing the pine ex-situ after winning a tendering process in 1999 to secure exclusive rights for the

propagation and marketing of the Wollemi Pine on behalf of the Royal Botanic Gardens & Domain Trust, Sydney and the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. The partnership involves a division of labor, with Queensland Forestry in

charge of propagation, and Birkdale, of marketing. In yet another partnership, research and horticultural development has been conducted since 1995 at Mount Annan Botanic Garden, Cambelltown, in Sydney's south, where seeds are stored in the NSW Seedbank.

Brand ownership is a critical component in the pine's ongoing protection program. Wollemi Australia owns the Wollemi Pine as intellectual property, effectively preventing anyone from selling cultivars from material stolen from the wild site for profit. It has managed its portfolio brilliantly in conjunction with other botanical bodies in Australia, such as Mount Annan Botanic Garden, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Mount Tomah Botanic Gardens, and Taronga Park Zoo, all in Sydney; the Australian National Botanic Garden in Canberra, botanic gardens in Adelaide and Mount Lofty, the

Royal Tasmanian Botanical Garden in Hobart, and Kings 93

Test-tube cultivation of the ANCIENT SPECIES FOR MODERN USE.



Park and Botanic Garden in Perth. Each of these institutions has been growing its own Wollemis for the past few years, so

by the time the Sotheby's auction rolled around in October 2005, the public could see Wollemis at different stages of

growth all around the country. Children could visit a small

grove of Wollemis, for example, on their way to the lion cage at Taronga Park Zoo, overlooking Sydney Harbor. That was

perhaps the most touchingly apt setting, marking the commodification involved in such displacement.

For there are serious issues here, masked by a fairground- like exuberance that is the gloss that populist enthusiasm

puts on scientific endeavor when its parameters escape our control. While it may seem churlish to say so in such a con- text, where auctions and flower shows and nursery displays are all contributing to the noble cause of conservation in gen- eral, and the "viability" of the Wollemi out of the wild in

particular, it is part of the Wollemi Story. Not for nothing did Hong Kong Disneyland snap up a swag of Wollemis to

supplement its collection of date palms, also imported from far-distant shores. Theme parks are the name of the game, and that means a commodification of history and the environment - time and nature. Consumerism requires nothing less, as we know.

On the Sunday of the Sotheby's auction, unnaturally hot for a spring day, a good crowd had gathered before the scheduled start at ? pm. Korean and Japanese media were much in evidence, some Taiwanese - the Conifer Connec- tion, the same people to whom the Hunter exports its coal.

Digital cameras were clicking, TY cameras were being set on

tripods. A bank of Sotheby's staff, cell phones at the ready, was in place along one side of the marquis where prospective buyers were thumbing through their Sotheby's catalogues. The buzz was genial.

Sotheby's had wheeled in their "star," chairman of

Sotheby's Australia, Justin Miller. He first thanked the elders of the Cadigal Tribe, traditional owners of the land on which the Royal Botanic Gardens grow, sweeping from behind J0rn Utzon's Opera House at Bennelong Point across the Cove to Lady Macquarie's Chair. Behind Miller stood a

big Tactical Cargo Solutions, Botany truck, from which the 292 Wollemis in 148 lots - 79 single trees, 35 duos, 26 trios, six groves of five trees each, a special collection of 15 trees, and an "avenue" of 20 trees - awaited collection, along with certificates of authenticity to which their buyers were enti-

tled, provenance being all in a first -generation collector's edition. Just as in a wine sale where the oldest Grange will

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fetch more than a young one, high hopes were pinned, on the trees whose parents dominate the wilderness where Noble found them. In the catalogue, parent trees were listed by name, along with height and girth, number of coppices, if any; vintage was translated as propagation date. Lot l's parent tree was The Bill Tree, king of the Wollemis at 40 meters ( 100 feet) tall and 1,000 years old. Kicking the bidding off with a bang, it swiftly went for $5,000. This was twice the top estimate ($l,500-$2,500). Not bad for a potted plant 158 centimeters high, propagated in September 1999.

Lot 5, a grove of five trees named The Cunningham Collection after Allan Cunningham, one of Australia's pioneer botanists and explorers, boasted an impeccable pedigree: The Bill Tree, The de Carvalho, Geb, The John Banks, The Linnaeus. It went to a phone bidder for $26,000 - $11,000 more than the top estimate. Things were warming up, Miller hitting his stride with good-humored banter: "Lots of gen- tlemen bidding for The Lady Bushranger" (Lot 6). Lot 17, also a Lady Bushranger: "Hear the hearts pounding." Hands were flying as consumer delirium quietly mounted.

Lot 20, a grove of 15 trees called The Sir Joseph Banks Collection after the mighty botanist who accompanied Captain James Cook on his south sea voyages, included a tree propagated from each of the 15 trees in the wild from which cuttings were taken. It was billed as "the closest you will get to replicating the actual Wollemi Pine Grove in the wild." It went to a private buyer (perhaps a media baron, according to the popular press) who remains anonymous, for $115,000. The estimate was $20,000-$50,000.

There was one disappointment. Lot 40, the avenue of 20 trees propagated in February 1999 and illustrated in the catalogue by an image of the trees leading to the Apollo Fountain in Versailles, went for $18,000, well under the $25,000- $45,000 estimate.

The atmosphere was festive, in the way of all charity auctions such as this. The total take was $962,875, impressive for a horticultural fundraiser, albeit one with a global scope, with recipients ranging from local conservation groups - the Botanical Gardens Trust, the Blue Mountains World Heritage Trust - to overseas groups - the New Zealand Plant Conser- vation Network, Stiftung Naturschutz in Hamburg, and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, UK. It also showcased botanists and conservationists, alive and dead, from around the world in the names attributed to the parent trees.2

Since the auction, the local Wollemi laboratory output has been staggering. From April 1, 2006, when the mass-

9$

2. The trees got names from stars like Sir Joseph Banks, Allan Cunningham, Carl Linnaeaus, and Charles Darwin, as well as more obscure researchers, like Dr. Winifred Curtis, for whom Lot 35, Tree 1?, The Curtis, is named. At 101, Curtis is still an Honorary Associate of the Tas- manian Herbarium. Lot 2, Tree 3, The de Carvalho, is named after Dr. Demetrio de Carvalho, a pioneer of the environmental protection movement in the world's newest nation, East Timor.



market release was launched, to June, more than 37,000 Wollemis were sold, 20,000 preordered online through Wollemi Australia and its 200 select retail outlets. Noble too has had his work cut out for him as the media-friendly Wollemi explorer/Aussie icon, popping up at "uncaging" events, in which large metal cages that look like scale models of the carapace of the 1850 Crystal Palace are lifted by crane from established Wollemis, actually and symbolically releas-

ing them not so much from imprisonment in their canyon- cage wilderness as for their new life as domestic garden plants. Noble even popped up at the side of Ivan Gasparovic, president of Slovakia, to unveil a Wollemi import on Slovakian soil.

Should we praise Noble or curse him? He himself is innocent of anything but finding a tree we thought had been dead for 10 million years. But in doing so, he swept aside the veil of invisibility that protected the trees in their own delicate habitat for countless eons. That habitat, science says, is

inadequate to the task. Science has a way of conquering, col-

onizing, commodifying, controlling - owning. The wizards of Wollemi mass propagation are all to a

degree complicit in a process that ultimately leads to the translation of wilderness into a theme park, and of a unique, minutely specific ecosystem into urban jungle prop. If that sounds harsh, it's not about the harmless kitsch like that on

display throughout the events showcasing the Wollemi a- round the world this year. Perhaps the Chelsea Flower Show was sober, with Her Majesty the Queen in attendance, but other shows, like Flora Bratislva, the Genoa Euroflora Show, the world's biggest with 600,000 visitors, and Flower Action

Japan, all featured dinosaurs and theme-park kitsch in their

displays. The Wollemi Display at Euroflora won best display with its Jurassic dinosaurs. It will be a hard act to follow for

Japan's Makuharo Messe (Dinosaur Expo) this October. It is more about what happens to the Wollemi itself in its

translation to "the Wollie" of white dreaming - product- driven, market-adapted. The biggest Wollemi theme park in the world is in the Mount Annan Botanic Gardens, which unveiled the Wollemi Walk of Discovery on March 31 this

year, with, of course, Noble, plus a local TV garden- show

celebrity, Jerry Coleby-Williams. The 90 Wollemis that com-

prise the walk are clones of each of the 90 mature Wollemis in the wild - that is, exact genetic replicates, thereby "re-

producing" the original Wollemi Pine population. The clones have been planted on poor, rocky ground on a steep slope at the back of an outcrop known as Sundial Hill, closely

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A MODERN WOLLEMI, PROPAGATED IN A LABORATORY.

replicating the original population's environment - sort of. The educative function and visual pleasure of this dis-

play are indisputable. As "surround ecology" it is like a will-

fully naive revisiting of the diorama, or the 19th-century panorama that brought distant marvels to Western city- dwellers in a theater in the round. , At least the trees are liv-

ing, breathing, beautiful. It may be another millennium, though, before they begin to be as magnificent in themselves.

They will never be in the same environment. What happens to wilderness, all wilderness, when theme

parks take over? Would it have mattered if we had never set

eyes on the wild Wollemis? How do we relate to nature when we can't own it, can't even see it with our own eyes in situ?

Ironically, those questions are now mute, for owning a Wollemi may now be the only way to save it. Ownership is

becoming almost a moral obligation. I will be buying one to

replace the majestic Tasmanian Bluegum struck by lightning and killed stone dead in my Sydney backyard two years ago. It is another, quite breathtaking way of bringing the magnificent into the city, after all.

The trees retail in three sizes: small, 150 mm pine ($70); medium, 200 mm pine ($100), and large, 430 mm pine ($530), offering something for every budget. Moreover, mass propagation techniques developed at Mount Annan ensure that supply matches demand. Rather than using seeds, which are rare and difficult to collect, the Mount Annan staff have found that cuttings taken from the lateral branches produce a "delightful prostrate plant suitable as a spreading potplant or ground cover" - useful for weeping prettily over the edge of apartment balconies or in gardens where height is an issue. Not so magnificent. A tree that can soar to 100 feet, reduced to ground cover or a patio pot!

But then, the Wollemi Pine is magnificently adaptable, as science has shown. The initial fear was that one of the rarest plant species in the world was delicate. The opposite is true - at least within its new laboratory and domestic set- tings. The Wollemi can be grown in temperatures ranging from -5 to 45°C (23 to 113°F) and has withstood trials of -12°C. It loves water, nutrients, and light, but it can survive with little of any of these. You can't kill it.

And that's just as well. Because the only place it seems it may not survive is in the Wollemi wilderness that has been its home for over 90 million years - or for up to 1,000 years in the case of the living trees. For despite all the appeals to respect the sanctity of the site, it has been violated.

Dr. Tony Fleming of the NSW National Parks and

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Wollemi "time line." Wildlife Service said in early November 2005 that the root rot fungus Phytophtbora cinnamomi had been confirmed in the soil and in at least one tree. "This is a micro-organism that can be extremely serious for plants that are susceptible to it," he said, adding that the recent drought may have put the trees under more stress and made them more susceptible to the fungus J Global warming is now reported widely as preventing drought -stricken trees from filtering carbon dioxide as efficiently as when not under such stress. Dieback is now a

major threat to the Wollemi Pine. It is a waterborne disease, but it can also be brought in on shoes, and "foreign" foot-

prints have been found at the site. "You need to be a canyoner to get into the place," says

Fleming. So is this an athletic permutation of age-old Aussie larrikanism, the modern compulsion to do something "because I can"? Or do broadcasters like Attenborough, who have brought the magic of nature into our living rooms, exposing hidden things from the darkest depths of the ocean to the frozen mountaintops, and even the unseen in our own

backyards, in breathtaking footage that has done much to foster respect for the natural world, inadvertently do harm

by equally fostering the requirement of total visibility? Whatever the case, if the dieback cannot be stopped, it

may be that a tree that has lived undisturbed for geological eons, surviving cyclical drought and fire and no fewer than 17 ice ages, may not survive discovery by white man for more than 13, 14, 15 years. We may be grateful that Wollemia nobilis live on as the Wollie in the urbosystem of the over-

hangs of our concrete canyons, alongside the sculptural agaves and other heat-resistant desert plants.

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Julie Rose gardens in Sydney, where is she is also completing a new English translation of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.

]. Anna Salleh, "Wollemi pine infected by fungus," News in Science (November 4, 2005). http://www.abc.net.au/science/ news/enviro/EnviroRepublish_1497961. htm (accessed August 2, 2006).



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