Another Life Michael VineyA new tree has entered my life and, exotic conifer though it is, I'm enchanted. Even its family resemblance to the monkey-puzzle tree, that prickly alien that overpowers so many Irish lawns, cannot put me off.
For one thing, it's not prickly; its fronds are softly pendant. And for another, it's less than two feet high at the moment, a modestly ferny little tree in a presentation pot. How far I encourage it towards a potential 20m remains to be seen.
What really stirs the soul about Wollemia nobilis is that it's a rare, living fossil that was hiding in a deep Australian gorge until 1994, surviving dinosaurs, bush fires, continental drought and all the plant-hunting quests of modern botany. I remember the thrill of reading about Peter Noble, a ranger in the great Wollemi national park, in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, who abseiled down a cliff into a grove of remarkable trees and took a spray of foliage back for the expert botanists to look at.
The Wollemi pine, as it is dubbed now, has a strangely bubbled bark and the habit in the wild of coppicing itself - growing multiple stems - as a defence against drought, fire, or the fall of rocks in its last canyon refuges (one, with about 100 trunks, is nearly 1,000 years old). The tree was hitherto known only from fossils between 60 and 200 million years old and is of the same family - Auraucariaceae (try the rhythm of "expialidocious") - as the Chilean pine we call the monkey-puzzle tree.
Since 1994, after years of searches, fewer than 100 Wollemi pines, all DNA clones of a single survivor, have been found and their location is still kept secret. The biggest threats are from collectors, vandals and other more innocent humans who might carry a plant disease. A good defence was to propagate the pine from cuttings and help fund its conservation from a royalty on trees sold. But how widely would it grow? In New South Wales the pine dwells in warm temperate rain forest in canyons topped by eucalyptus trees and partly choked with sassafras, both of which happen to thrive in gardens on Howth Head, for example. And the balmy peninsulas of south-west Ireland are already home to all manner of lofty Antipodean conifers. The last "fossil" tree to be found - the dawn redwood Metasequoia discovered in central China some 60 years ago - is now common in most of the "heritage" gardens of Ireland.
As it happens, the Wollemi pine is far from a tender plant. Among its global trials was the planting, without any protection, of 15 trees in Kew Gardens in the UK in 2005. They survived minus 6.2 degrees Celsius one night in February, 2006, in one of the coldest recent winters in southern England. Our our own National Botanic Gardens at Glasnevin had already planted the first Wollemi to reach Ireland, a gift from the Australian ambassador. It was one of 30 trees now on trial on State lands.
This year, the trees reached Ireland's garden centres (see the list at www. wollemipine.co.uk) at a price - €150 - that demands a rather serious interest or, perhaps, (as for our tree) a special celebration. The Johnstown Garden Centre in prosperous Co Kildare has already sold more than 150 of them. Many will grow as indoor or patio specimens - they tolerate almost infinite pruning - but a test of their global stamina needs proper planting in a sheltered spot with three metres to spare in all directions.
In the wild, they grow to 40m, with a trunk diameter of over one metre, but the cultivar's height is projected at only half that, achieved at perhaps half a metre a year.
For the most flourishing chance of success, it also needs the contents of a packet, supplied with the plant, of "Jurassic mycorrhizal fungi".
Mycorrhiza means simply fungus-root, and describes a bonding of tree roots with a sheath of fungus tissues. This living partnership enables the tree roots to absorb more food from the soil, while the fungus takes carbohydrates from the tree.
The mycorrhiza in the packet are from a group of fungi whose role is almost as old as trees themselves. In the early era of land plants, in particular, as tree root systems were developing, the fungi helped them to take up phosphate, a nutrient that diffuses only slowly through the soil.
Today, they often serve also as an antibiotic defence that protects trees against disease (some landscape gardeners are using mycorrhiza as a hopeful counter- attack to the destructive honey-fungus).
Meanwhile, the trees we ourselves have planted across 30 years mingle around 20 species in ever-spreading shade. There's a prostrate yew inside the gate that, planted as a garden-centre miniature, now covers some 40sq m with golden branches. Still, the Wollemi would only go up . . . and up . . . to test the Atlantic air.
EyeOnNature
How do wasps make their nests?
Lochlann McGill, Falcarragh, Co Donegal
In spring the emerging queen wasp scrapes thin strips of wood with her strong jaws from fences or other dead wood. She chews it, mixes it with saliva making a soft pulp, then spreads it into a thin sheet of paper to make the centre of the nest and some cells. The first brood of new workers enlarge the nest.
On July 18th, I saw two triggerfish (Balistes carolinensis) trapped in a rock pool at Derrynane, Co Kerry. I think they might have been a male and a female; one was definitely much darker in colour, with a larger dorsal fin with iridescent blue lines on it. Markings on the paler animal were much less obvious.
... Julia Nunn, Newtownards, Co Down
Three years ago I moved here from the US and was relieved that I would no longer have to wage war on Japanese knotweed. Now I find that no matter where I go in Co Donegal, it is staring me in the face. In England, wardens are assigned to prevent its propagation. It should be eradicated here.
... Mary F Brennan, Co Donegal