Wollemia nobilis

It grows naturally in sheltered rainforest gorges in New South Wales, Australia.

Chloroplast comparisons place it close to Agathis, another araucarian conifer.

The trunk has dark brown, knobbly bark, and the species can reach about 40 metres in height.

Leaves differ between upright leading shoots and horizontal branches, and between juvenile and adult foliage.

On juvenile lateral shoots they are long and narrow, with a dark green upper surface and a paler, bluish underside; adult lateral foliage is shorter and arranged in four regular rows.

The tree can also produce new upright stems through coppicing, giving it a multi-stemmed form.

An adult tree can bear both pollen cones and seed cones.

In the Australian observations reported in 1999, pollen was released in spring, during October and November, and seed cones matured 16–19 months later.

Mature cone scales separate and release winged seeds.

Not every apparently formed seed contains an embryo: a 2025 study found many empty seeds in cones from an isolated garden tree.

The filled seeds were viable, supporting the possibility of successful self-fertilization in that tree.

Young Wollemi pines can grow from seed, while resprouting offers another way for established plants to persist.

Mature Wollemi pines emerge above warm-temperate rainforest, including forest with coachwood and sassafras.

Their early life can be much less conspicuous: a study following seedlings and juveniles from 1996 to 2011 found very slow growth and high seedling mortality.

The researchers proposed that a bank of slow-growing juveniles, together with resprouting, helps maintain the population.

Cultivation research describes sensitivity to extreme heat, extreme cold, strong light and drought, with a preference for acidic, freely draining soils.

New South Wales Flora Online lists the Wollemi pine as Critically Endangered under both the state and Commonwealth systems.

Fire, climate change and disease threaten the remaining wild population.

Conservation collections outside its natural habitat provide insurance against losses and material for research and carefully planned translocations.

Their value depends partly on retaining genetic differences, not simply on increasing the number of cultivated plants.

Earlier genetic surveys detected little or no variation, but a 2016 chloroplast study distinguished three chlorotypes—different chloroplast DNA variants—among the sampled trees.

This discovery gives conservationists a way to represent more of the surviving diversity when selecting propagation material.

The result concerns chloroplast DNA, so it is not a complete description of variation across the tree’s nuclear genome.

The 1999 study reported viable seed production and germination under glasshouse conditions, whereas the long-term field study recorded severe losses among newly emerged seedlings.

These observations address different stages and environments, so successful germination should not be equated with successful recruitment in the wild.

Burrows’s 2025 seed study used one isolated garden tree, not a replicated comparison of selfed and outcrossed offspring.

The author explicitly identified the frequency of selfing and its effect relative to outcrossing as unresolved.

Yap and colleagues reported a circular chloroplast genome of 145,630 base pairs in 2015 and associated it with GenBank accession KP259800.

They combined sequencing datasets and used comparison with Agathis to resolve a gap before checking the assembly against reads.

This is a plastome result, not a measurement of the whole nuclear genome.

The 2016 study reported six chloroplast single-nucleotide differences defining three chlorotypes, with one chlorotype interpreted as a possible somaclonal mutant.

Those markers identify sampled differences; they do not demonstrate that all trees share identical nuclear DNA or resolve the entire population history.

Offord and Zimmer’s 2025 synthesis connects propagation and cultivation research to genetically representative conservation collections, translocations and a distributed botanic-garden collection.

Such collections complement protection of rainforest habitat rather than demonstrating that the wild population is secure.

Scientific name

Wollemia nobilis

Taxonomic rank

species

Provider status

accepted

col identifier

5C32P

Source lineage

1. Eukaryota (Chatton, 1925) Whittaker & Margulis, 1978 domain
2. Plantae kingdom
3. Pteridobiotina Britton & Brown subkingdom
4. Tracheophyta phylum
5. Pinopsida Burnett class
6. Cupressidae Doweld subclass
7. Araucariales Gorozh. order
8. Araucariaceae Henkel & W.Hochst. family
9. Wollemia W.G.Jones, K.D.Hill & J.M.Allen genus
10. Wollemia nobilis W.G.Jones, K.D.Hill & J.M.Allen species

Source classification release