*”It’s the equivalent of finding a Tyrannosaurus rex in your back yard,” said Jimmy Turner, Director of Horticultural Research at Dallas Arboretum. It’s either a triumph of marketing or a millstone round the neck of botanists who think the Wollemi Pine should have a place in the Anthropocene as well as the Jurassic era.

The first fossils of a Wollemi Pine-like tree date from around 200 million years ago at the start of the Jurassic. The last are from around two million years ago and it had been thought to be extinct. In 1996 David Noble, a NSW National Parks and Wildlife Services Officer, was in Wollemi National Park and found what looked like an odd tree. He took a fallen branch to botanists who first thought it was a fern. When Noble said it was from a tree it started a research programme that eventually found this was a whole new genus of plant similar to the trees that were common in the time of the dinosaurs.

The situation today is that fewer than 100 mature trees survive in the wild. When it comes to being endangered the Wollemi Pine makes the Giant Panda population look positively healthy. It’s closer to the Kakapo. It seems to me extraordinary that you can now buy something critically endangered for the back garden. The big advantage the Wollemi Pine has over the Kakapo is that it has more options for reproduction. A Kakapo like nearly all other animals needs a partner of the same species to reproduce, or the attempt ends in failure.