In my ramblings last week I mentioned the Wollemi pine – a tree that was only discovered relatively recently. I thought you might like to know some more about this amazing species.

For a start, it’s not even technically a pine. It belongs to the same family as the monkey puzzle tree, the Araucariaceae, and its Latin name isn’t Pinus, like true pines, but Wollemia nobilis.

Like the dawn redwood, Metasequoia glyptostroboides, which was found in China in the 1940s, Wollemia was previously known only from fossils, some of them dating back to the Jurassic era.

Discovered in 1994, the Wollemi is one of the world’s rarest trees, existing in the wild as a single stand of fewer than a hundred trees, in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, Australia. It is named after the Wollemi Park where it was found and David Noble, the park ranger who found it.

The wild trees are tall but have a coppicing habit, producing up to a hundred separate trunks or stems; the oldest wild tree is thought to be around a thousand years old.

The trees’ exact location in the wild is a closely guarded secret, but conservationists have come up with a cunning plan to protect the Wollemi, which involves propagating it and spreading it around the world as a cultivated plant.

Not only have they made it widely available and thus pointless to steal from the wild, they’ve also made money from the sale of plants, which is being used for conservation of both the species and the area.

The first Wollemi to be grown in Britain was planted by Sir David Attenborough at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in 2005. Now there are Wollemi pines in gardens all over the country; the one in my photo is growing in a private garden in North Yorkshire.

My second photo is of a pine whose home is half way round the world from Australia – it is Pinus montezumae, the Montezuma pine, from Mexico and Guatemala.

Sadly I didn’t photograph it in the wild, but at the Mount Usher gardens, in County Wicklow, in Ireland. As you can see from the picture, this pine’s claim to fame rests with its needles, which are between six and 12 inches long and a beautiful grey-green in colour. It’s not widely available in the nursery trade, though my PlantFinder lists three or four nurseries in the south which stock it.

If only someone would take it up and make it as widely available as the Wollemi – it would make a great Christmas tree, though sweeping up the spent needles might just block the Hoover!

Jobs for this week...

l Prune blackcurrant bushes, cutting out one third of the oldest stems to ground level.

l Plant deciduous trees and shrubs if the weather is mild, but not if the ground is frozen or waterlogged.

l Check greenhouses and frames regularly for lost, loose and broken glass. Make repairs as soon as possible, the next lot of high winds may get in through the gaps and make things worse.