Plant Profile: Wollemi Pine

Baz Blain is a gardener with an almost obsessive love of Wollemi pines, which he grows from seed on his 9-acre property about 40 minutes from Hobart. As a council horticulturist, he spends his days looking after the many parks and reserves in historic Richmond, Tasmania, but after work he heads home to his hot houses, shade houses and outside nursery, all jam-packed with hundreds of pots of plants he’s grown – what he refers to as “his babies”.

Wollemi Pines were only discovered in 1994, when a bushwalker in NSW’s Blue Mountains saw a tree he didn’t recognise, so carried out a sample for identification. Eventually botanists declared it a new species – although it was recognised from fossil records and belongs to a plant family that is 200 million years old.
Fewer than 100 specimens of this rare, ancient tree exist in the wild – but a propagating program started and plants were made available for the public to buy from 2006. Around the same time, Baz Blain discovered gardening. “I was working in some dead-end job – a fish factory I think – and one weekend I helped a mate plant out some trees on his property. That just gave me the gardening bug, so gave up my job, started studying horticulture and have been obsessed with it ever since.”

When the first Wollemi pines were released for sale he was working at a nursery and he bought a couple. “I’ve been growing them on and when they started producing seed I started propagating it.” Now Baz possibly has more Wollemi pine in pots that there are specimens in the wild. And he plants more seed each year. “I just love them – I think they’re a very special tree.”



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