Royal Botanic Garden Sydney

This guide to the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney traces the 1994 discovery of the Wollemi Pine, a tree species known only from sixty-million-year-old fossils, found alive by a park ranger in a hidden Blue Mountains gorge whose exact location is still kept secret. It follows how cuttings were brought here, to a garden that began as a failed 1788 colonial farm before Governor Macquarie set it aside in 1816, and planted as the first Wollemi Pine ever grown by human hands. Somewhere nearby stands a tree whose lineage predates this harbour by sixty million years.