Wally the Wollemi finds a new home
CU Boulder alumni Judy and Rod McKeever donate a tree once considered extinct to the EBIO greenhouse, giving students a living example of modern conservation
Wally probably doesn’t know he’s a dinosaur.
He’s just living his best life in a bright spot—but not directly sunny, he doesn’t like that—in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology greenhouse on 30th Street.
This guy! Talk about charisma. People have certain stereotypes and expectations for what he should be, and he defies them. For starters, he’s here and not, after all, extinct.
Yes, Wally the Wollemi is something special—a Cretaceous Period pine tree thought to have rediscovered in a secluded Australian canyon in 1994 and, with a few steps in between, recently donated to the greenhouse.
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. “Where we are right now with climate change, we’re losing plants and animal species and insect diversity at an extremely rapid rate, so as scientists and horticulturists and curators it’s our job to maintain the diversity of the world in collections, and Wally is an important part of that," says Malinda Barberio, EBIO greenhouse manager.
“The Wollemi pine is an interesting story about paleobotany as well as conservation,” explains Malinda Barberio, greenhouse manager. “Where we are right now with climate change, we’re losing plants and animal species and insect diversity at an extremely rapid rate, so as scientists and horticulturists and curators it’s our job to maintain the diversity of the world in collections, and Wally is an important part of that.”
Back from extinction
How Wally came to live in a quiet spot in the 30th Street greenhouse is a story that started in the Cretaceous. Scientists theorized that herbivorous dinosaurs living then dined on Wollemi pines, which belong to a 200-million-year-old plant family and are abundantly represented in the fossil record dating as far back as 91 million years.
Where they weren’t abundantly represented was in the living world. They were theorized to have gone extinct, living only in stone impressions.
However, in 1994, New South Wales (Australia) National Parks ranger in a remote canyon about five hours west of Sydney when he happened upon a stand of pine trees unlike anything he’d seen before. They had fern-like foliage, distinctive bumpy bark and a dense, rounded crown. They towered over other trees in the canyon.
“Typically, you think of pines as Christmas tree-shaped, fairly triangular, so that dense top crown that’s very rounded is a little odd for pines,” Barberio says. “And you typically expect large, fluffy branches, but the Wollemi’s branches are covered in thicker, flat needles that are in two rows parallel to each other along the sides of branches, which is really distinctive.”
Intense scientific investigation followed Noble’s discovery, including comparison to the fossil record, until it was agreed: This was the Wollemi pine—back from extinction.
ĚýĚýFollow Wally and his friends in the greenhouse at on Instagram.
The ongoing threat of extinction loomed large, though, because there were fewer than 100 trees in that canyon, whose location remains a closely guarded secret. So, in 2006, and in an unusual partnership between the National Geographic Society, the Floragem plant wholesalers, conservationists, botanists and scientists, 10-inch Wollemi pines were offered for sale in National Geographic’s holiday catalog.
“You are now the owner of a tree that is a survivor from the age of the dinosaurs, a miraculous time traveler and one of the greatest living fossils discovered in the twentieth century,” began the catalog description of the 10-inch saplings selling for $99.95.
That’s what caught Judy McKeever’s attention.
A tree named Wally
“My husband (Rod) does bonsai and loves his bonsai garden, so when I saw the advertisement for National Geographic selling these trees, and it was a love story about finding a dinosaur in an Australian canyon, I thought it would be the perfect addition to his collection,” recalls McKeever (A&S’76). “But he never got bonsaied or really trimmed at all, and just kind of grew out of control.”
The couple named him Wally because it sounds like Wollemi, and he lived in a sheltered, south-facing spot on their Boulder deck in the summer and under a grow light in their basement in the winter. Between seasons, they toted him up and down the stairs—and every year he was bigger.
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CU Boulder alumni Judy and Rod McKeever donated Wally the Wollemi pine tree to the EBIO greenhouse in October.
“We didn’t really do anything special, just treated him like every other plant we have,” McKeever says. “He lived a sheltered little life, occasionally got fertilized, and he was very happy. We just let him do whatever he wanted to do; he’s an Australian free spirit.
“We just loved Wally, but he grew a few inches every year and with the soil and pot, he just got to be too heavy to take down to the basement every winter.”
In early autumn, McKeever began looking for places that might be interested in adopting Wally and found the EBIO greenhouse. There was an element of homecoming since both Judy and Rod are 1976 CU Boulder graduates (Rod in chemical engineering); Wally would be staying in the family.
“We are very happy to bring Wally into our collection,” Barberio says. “For the university to have a Wollemi pine is a really special privilege. It allows students to have an example of conservation efforts that are modern and recent in history and shows them that they have the opportunity to participate in these efforts as well.”
Plus, she adds, Wally is a great opportunity for public outreach: People can schedule time to visit him in the greenhouse and see science, conservation and worldwide partnerships at work. And students in future paleobotany classes will be able to see just how close scientists and artists got in visually rendering the Wollemi pine from fossil evidence.
“It’s surprisingly accurate how well they were able to reproduce (Wollemi pines) in theory,” Barberio says. “We have all of these animals and plants that are extinct, and having this living example is a really cool way to show how close we got it.”
A part in plant diversity
As for the care and feeding of Wally, who actually isn’t only male since pines produce both male and female cones, he likes acidic soil and bright but not direct light, given that he’s prone to sunburn. He likes regular watering and doesn’t like his soil to completely dry out, but he also dislikes “wet feet,” or for the bottom layer of soil to be damp.
Because his very few wild relatives live in a protected canyon, it may be implied that Wollemi pines prefer protection from rapid temperature changes, Barberio says, adding that so far, he’s shown no signs of producing cones.
“We would love to have Wally produce cones in the future,” she says, “and of course we would try to plant and grow them.”
Until that time, Wally the Wollemi pine will be a signature plant in the greenhouse collection and an example, Barberio says, “that we can play a part in maintaining the diversity of the plant world.”
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